Burn The Bridge Home
by Laryna6
Summary: Why beta test your ultimate creation by putting it in a capsule for decades when you invented time travel and can just go and see how it turns out, then make the necessary adjustments? Unless your rogue destroyer puts a beam saber through your heart first. Or, in which X and Zero carjack Dr. Wily's time machine.
1. It's Technically Commandeering

_The carish thing is from the OVA, but you can imagine a Delorian if you like._

_So, I had four chapters of this written years ago, but then I went to other projects but kept tinkering with it every once in awhile, and then I realized that I should really use Shade Man for a certain scene (the Mega Man Gigamix version of him is great) and I generally had to rip out a lot of what I'd written._

_Since I need practice revising, this is another of those fics that I decided to clean up, finish and post. I hope you find it at least somewhat amusing._

_Takes place in a mix of Mega Man Megamix/Gigamix and the take I had on the 'verse before they came out. _Spoilers for the entire Hitoshi Ariga manga_. _

* * *

Although one would never have known it, looking at the military parts of the installation and the pods people used while on call, Maverick Hunter HQ's personnel housing, with its landscaped gardens and large amount of space per hunter, was quite luxurious by modern standards.

Barracks were obviously impractical: separate quarters for all hunters were a must. If people had been jammed together the virus would have spread like wildfire, with mavericks infecting roommates in their sleep.

No: having a secure, homelike refuge with plenty of privacy and personal space to go to was essential, not just a morale boost. And they needed morale boosts, in the face of the average hunters' life expectancy. The world owed a certain amount of luxury to those about to die, and it would have been the height of folly to mistreat those who fought mavericks. That would have been begging for defections.

Also, hunters living like humans encouraged them to understand humans, learn what they were fighting for.

Thus it was that on a summer afternoon (pleasant, thanks to the weather control system), a few off-duty hunters were having a picnic on a grassy knoll when something vaguely resembling an antique automobile appeared out of thin air, interrupting Signas telling Axl stories about the couple years he'd spent as a private investigator before replacing his father, X starting to clean up a bit and Zero doing kata while he listened with half an ear.

Since obviously anything that would appear in the middle of their base without warning (and next to all three immune hunters and the commander!) had to be hostile, Signas ducked behind Axl, who drew his guns and prepared to cover him, X dropped the plates as he whirled and started to charge a shot, and Zero…

When Zero got a look at the man behind the wheel, his jaw dropped. "You!"

X's own eyes widened: he'd learned all he could about his family, so that face was instantly recognizable. That, and the iconic hairstyle. Axl was the only one who didn't have a clue who this guy was.

"At least you recognize me this time," Wily muttered. "But what is this, X is still alive? Another failure." He started to push buttons on the dashboard.

Zero was already diving for the vehicle, and seeing that red blur X used his own dash boots to catch up. Axl hesitated: on the one hand, if Zero and X were attacking whoever this guy was he should to, but on the other he did kind of have to cover Signas or Zero would kill him. Being a trainee sucked like that.

Signas was observing every detail he could for later analysis, since he'd also recognized that infamous hairstyle, so he was the one who noticed the black reploid (or was it?) in the backseat, who had seemed almost bored when the vehicle appeared. Unlike the driver, he had noticed Zero and X's approach, but didn't bother to alert him as Zero pounced on the hood, X joined him… and the vehicle disappeared. The vehicle piloted by _Dr. Wily_ disappeared.

With two of the three living immune hunters, and Axl was young, untested, and might break down at any moment for all they knew.

There was really only one response to something like that. Unfortunately, it consisted of words that couldn't be printed in official reports.

* * *

The value of the observational data aside, the passenger sitting in the backseat thought, if the android master unit did anything more than it already had (which was pick Wily up, shake him and curse him, almost snarling in fury), he would have to blow it up, and that would be a tragic waste of life. He still hadn't forgotten watching Copy-Rock die.

"Zero, stop!" X grabbed Zero's arm.

Zero turned to glare at him, not putting Wily down.

Since X knew that under the circumstances Zero would ignore any argument based on 'hurting people is wrong,' he pointed in front of them. "Look at where we are!"

Even in the grip of rage, Zero was too intelligent a fighter to kill Wily when they were in the middle of some kind of warping void and he was probably the only one who could put them back, so he made an irritated noise under his breath and dropped Wily back into his seat.

The observer raised an eyebrow, systems registering that the improved facial articulation was still worth the investment. Apparently Dr. Wily's killer android cursed like a Lightbot.

That was when X got a chance to notice him, other than as 'potential threat #2.' He seemed puzzled. "You are?"

Zero interrupted him. "Where are we?"

"The void between times, obviously. Why put my ultimate creation in a capsule running boring tests of your systems for decades when I can simply travel through time to see how you turn out and make the necessary adjustments?" While proper beta testing was useful, Dr. Light's method was for sissies. Waiting until the world was ready? Dr. Wily's creation would have no need to fear the world.

"You… all of this is your fault!" And now he was going to call a do-over? Make it so that all of Zero's battles on behalf of the Hunters had never happened? Try to ensure that this time Zero really _would _kill them all, kill X?

The world needed X back, they had to get back to their own time, but X could probably figure out how the thing worked, there were all sorts of dials and displays.

Before X could stop him, Zero's saber flashed, decapitating Dr. Wily.

He'd expected a spray of blood, but instead there were, "A _spring?" _His head was on a _spring? _

X's eyes widened. "A robot double?" He'd read about those in the legends. He could yell at Zero later.

"Of course," the observer said, leaning back in his seat. He would not have allowed Dr. Wily to come along on a mission this hazardous in the flesh. Not that Dr. Wily had ever planned on doing so, since he'd programmed his ultimate creation to kill all humans, including him, and had expected to arrive in a world covered in virus. That was why he had been sent: even Dr. Wily wouldn't have been able to remote-control the body from an entirely different era without the help of a robot master refining the signals.

"This is a time machine, isn't it?" X asked, after seeing the display. "How do we get home?"

They weren't going home, Zero decided. Not yet.

The other passenger just watched, both eyes open.

"Answer the question, please." Normally, X would have wanted to try negotiation, but Zero decapitating the robot's master had ruined any chance of that (although good cop bad cop was still an option).

He wasn't impressed when X pointed his buster at him, fully charged or not. "Please be careful not to damage the time machine."

"How much longer is this going to take?" Zero asked.

"Not much longer." With a time machine, the thing to say would normally be 'we've got all the time in the world' especially since none of them had aging to worry about. He wondered if androids were capable of boredom. Normally only young, confined robot masters were, since they lacked mental stimulation and data to contemplate, but both of these two should have had plenty of life experience to meditate on.

"Who are you?" X wondered. "You're not human, but you're not a robot master." Another android?

What? "Incorrect," he told the android, closing the eye that transmitted the video it took to Dr. Wily. "Whatever gave you that idea? I am a robot master. My name is Shadow Man."

"I'm sorry, it's just that I've never heard of a robot master that looked so realistic." Well, not counting Rock and Roll, but he'd thought even they would be, well, several design generations behind him. "You are a Wilybot, aren't you? But you're more accurate than I am." Little movements, all sorts of things that were very hard to copy. Most reploids weren't even as close to human as X, and a robot master surpassed him?

"Yes, I am a Wilybot. One designed for infiltration." Mining facilities on other planets, the Pentagon, blackmail material acquisition… " It looked like X's face was designed for emotional display instead of hyperrealism: while he certainly didn't fall in the uncanny valley, he was clearly intended to look cute instead of unmemorable.

While Dr. Wily crowed that Omega would be his greatest creation, his facial structure was less accurate than X's: that might have given the android the idea that Wily wasn't as good at it as Dr. Light? Frankly,in Omega's case Dr. Wily hadn't cared about realism, given the purpose of the project. "Dr. Wily's work has always been superior to Dr. Light's," Shadow Man informed him, because it would be a bad idea for the android to imply that Wilybot meant inferior work in front of a camera that wasn't shut off, and if he said something like that in front of Forte!

Zero opened his mouth to object, but then they arrived.

"Skull Fortress," X breathed, looking around with no small amount of trepidation. He'd faced mavericks many times, but this was walking into a legend.

"Yes." The old Skull Fortress, not Wily City, but he had no reason to give the android information. Getting out of the car, he called, "Jiraya!" A small orange frog-bot hopped up from the foot of the passenger's seat, where it had been keeping a weapon trained on Zero.

Shadow Man appreciated the thought, really, but why had Dr. Wily originally constructed his support unit as a giant orange mech when he was designed as an infiltration unit? It had been anything but inconspicuous. He had needed to leave Jiraya behind all of the time until it had occurred to him that he _was _a robot master, and should do his duty to his support unit as well as his creator. Upgraded with cloaking capability, it didn't matter what color Jiraya was, and a smaller body, a teleportation unit, weapon upgrades and storage space for weapon energy transportation (or other things…) had made him a valuable asset, like Megaman's Eddie.

They both teleported out.

X looked around the room, a strange, uncomprehending hope filling him. It couldn't be, time travel was the stuff of fantasy, and yet he _wanted _it to be real. "We should get back, Zero… Zero?" but Zero was gone as well. "Zero?"

He was alone in the middle of Dr. Wily's base? Why would Zero leave him behind.

He'd gone to kill his father and his past self, hadn't he. Zero would know that X would have to stop him. The person who created the virus was one thing: even if he hadn't unleashed the Maverick Virus yet, Dr. Wily was still responsible for the deaths of a great many others, but X wouldn't let his partner kill himself.

When he was a rookie, X would have pursued Zero, but for all he knew, he might arrive too late.

He'd been left alone in Skull Fortress. With a _time machine. _He wasn't going to fool around with that function if he didn't need to, but leaving a resource as valuable as this behind, in enemy hands? X slung himself back into the car. If he was lucky, it would have teleport capability separate from the time travel function, and X had a set of coordinates that would work in this era and the codes to get through the shield.

* * *

_Edit: Since the fic was originally going to have a certain plot, and then my idea of how I was going to handle a few different things kept changing. I went back to check something and found I'd uploaded the wrong draft. Fixed._


	2. Meeting Two Very Different Families

_References to the _Mega Man Gigamix _manga, which I can't recommend highly enough, but trying to avoid outright spoilers. Changing this fic to fit with Gigamix meant I had to take out one character, and replace the random robot master I picked for this chapter originally with a much better one._

* * *

Elsewhere, Zero was having a more traditional experience. Robots, spikes… Sigma had been copying from Wily's playbook all along, hadn't he? Zero had seen this, all of this so many times before. It was just a matter of reaching the end, the center, of finding the secret lab, of killing.

Of saving everyone. Sigma, Iris, Colonel: so many dead because of the virus. X, Axl, Alia: so many people grieving lost loved ones.

He knew that it might not be that simple. It probably wouldn't be, not with his luck, and this was _time travel _they were talking about.

Except it had to be possible to stop it. Had to be. He didn't want to cause so much destruction: if there was any hope of preventing it, any hope of ending it, then he had to take that chance.

He couldn't just give up.

* * *

Getting out of the car, X could feel the teleport shield, sense the security system here, as he stood at the edge of the property, not quite daring to step forward, to open the gate Beyond it, there were rosebushes and a large lawn that was clearly meant for play, not show. The house itself was clearly high-tech, built in a sort of futuristic style, but that just made it even more perfect, somehow. Symbols that screamed traditional nuclear family existing in harmony with, embracing the product of technology. Even the shield, the defenses, spoke of love, not of death, because what they protected was infinitely precious.

He'd seen images, even video of this place, of course. It wasn't the same as standing here, smelling these flowers, feeling these shields query his systems and _recognize _him. He hadn't even been turned on yet, he wouldn't be for decades (as far as they'd known), and he was still _known_.

Flowers and thorns, a Frisbee on the lawn and hidden weapons and other devices under it. He knew that his unborn body was likely somewhere in there, deep underground, protected by layers and layers of careful defenses that had survived an apocalypse.

He'd never seen this place in real life. He should feel like a stranger here, he should be depressed by the knowledge that this happy home would be reduced to scorched earth.

_Welcome home_ the system that pinged him had said warmly, in place of a more normal, mechanical acknowledgement of his identity, and he _was. _He could walk in now, and they would be surprised but glad to see him, it would be better than any dream because it would be _real._

_Don't be shy, come on in,_ he was sent. _It's not a good idea for you to just stand there in armor,_ the female voice added, and X realized this wasn't just a recording. Robot Masters had been system managers, able to merge with and direct them, receive input and reprogram over wireless signals. _No one's seen you yet – but… _

"Roll?"

"_Who else_?" As though she'd let someone else protect her family's home, an amused undercurrent conveyed.

"Oh." So that was why she wasn't surprised. "I'm… glad," he said, and swallowed.

Almost seventy-five years now, since he was released from the capsule. Such a long time, all of it spent adapting to the virus. Adapting to constant war. On top of how he'd evolved in the capsule.

He was still recognizable as a Lightbot? Still recognizable as X, or at least something pretending to be him? Right, free-willed androids were illegal, even a fake standing out in the street could give away X's existence, and then?

He'd expected robot masters to be more like reploids than this. Reploids didn't network like this, they didn't, they couldn't just merge with systems. It was a consequence of their theoretical immunity from reprogramming. The walls that should have kept things like the virus out sealed them into their own minds.

He would never have been able to get as good a reading on this system if Roll hadn't been converting the data into a form he could handle, he realized. Translating for him.

It wasn't a system that protected this place. It was _Roll_. It was her, or the remnants of her, as well as Dr. Light, that had protected him all those years. Even in death.

The gate unlatched easily – for him – and he stepped through, feeling the system's alert level, feeling her worry, decrease. "I didn't mean to cause any trouble."

"_It's not your fault: we can talk once you're inside. I'd come greet you, but I'm making some refreshments." _Since X could eat. Provided he was X: if not, he might have some trouble.

"Are Mega Man and Dr. Light here_?" _

"_Call him Rock alright? Mega Man's just for during the wars."_ And was he another war, brought to their doorstep? X had read about Dr. Light being kidnapped: would he really be allowed to meet them?_ "They're here, they just don't know you're here yet." _She could have sent the information to Rock, but she didn't want to ruin the surprise.

It was a red dog robot that spotted him next, looking surprised but not alarmed before finally coming up and sniffing him. He crouched to hold out his hand, palm down, the way he would with a real... or rather biological dog. "You're Rush… right?" A support unit, something else robot masters had used that didn't work for androids. On the one hand, it might have been nice to have the company, but mechanaloids could be infected and a non-sapient unit, even one built back in 20XX, might not be immune. "I'm X. It's nice to meet you."

He'd heard phrases like 'so happy I could cry,' and 'butterflies in my stomach,' but they didn't really apply. He might have been overjoyed, if this weren't a calming feeling instead of an excited one. He was _home_.

He was still worried about Zero.

Zero had his own family, and his own issues. If X had tried to drag him to Dr. Light's he'd have just broken out, gone searching for his own origins, to destroy them. X knew he had to wait for Zero to contact him.

The door opened and X heard, "You don't have to stand out there on the porch, mister…" Rock tilted his head at X, clearly assessing him. Was this a Wilybot impersonating X? Already? Well, Forte had stolen X's plans along with Rush's upgrades. And the rest of their database.

"I am X," he assured the legendary hero. "Dr. Wily came to my era in a time machine. Zero and I ended up along for the ride." The teleport system in this era was both much larger and much better guarded. In his era, much of it consisted of leftover orbiting transmitters from this era that had been hacked long ago (the original codes had been lost), and so anyone could access them.

Despite Rock's childlike looks, he was too experienced to take X's word for it, but the tension eased after a few seconds. He'd probably asked Roll if she knew 'X' was. "Hi, I'm Rock." That smile was adorable. "Come on in. Father's going to be really glad to meet you."

Even without the Cataclysm, Dr. Light probably wouldn't have been there when X woke up. That was why he'd made the armor capsules.

* * *

To think he'd bought into the general belief that robots were _primitive, _since he'd never had any reason to need to think about it. Dr. Wily had built _him_, so of course his technology was leaps and bounds above the best the hunters and mavericks had access to. There was even a formless shapeshifting thing here that might be related to Axl. It wasn't like they were sure of where he or Lumine had come from, damn secret projects. No: the designs might be simple, but they were _effective_. The best of 21XX's machines were mechanaloids, and mechanaloid technology always had a faintly animalistic quality to it. They, too, were based on X's nanites and could be infected by the virus. They were alive without being smart. They might do the tasks they were designed for, but somewhere in there were nanites and code that said they were an independent organism and so they'd try to think. Primitively. Then they got outsmarted, because he was a sentient veteran and they weren't.

These weren't mechanaloids he was facing. These were robots. They were following patterns designed by an_ intelligent_ mind with mechanical precision. He couldn't distract them, and in fact the fact they weren't too responsive to what he did meant on the one hand that once he had a strategy for each type it was a matter of repeating it but on the other that it was harder to draw them out of position.

Despite the bat themed-designs and quirky architecture, there was an air of ruthless efficiency about this place, these things. That he was dealing with machines that didn't have morale, that didn't have anger or fear, that just had jobs. And did them. Following their patterns and programming like waves crashing against a shore, and fencing with the sea was proverbially futile.

Oh, he'd killed them all. It felt like blowing the dust off old skills, like he knew their movement patterns. He knew almost to the second when a robot master had taken control of all of them and started coordinating their movements, adjusting positions to deal with a melee weapon-user. The change hadn't been that dramatic, but he'd _known_. There hadn't been a wireless signal, but this place was custom-built to be a Skull Fortress, the lair of Wily and his robot masters. He knew there were fiber-optic cables buried in the walls, and he hadn't a prayer of hacking into them to intercept the orders the master sent his robots. Of keeping the master from watching his every move.

He recognized so much of this place, from buried memories, and it would have terrified him if he hadn't funneled all of that into his desperation. "Where _am _I?" he said to himself, cutting down another sniper joe model. How hard could it be to find an android in a capsule? Dr. Cain hadn't even been looking for one when he'd found X!

He jumped down into a larger room and exclaimed, "Finally!" when a robot master teleported in. That hopefully meant he was getting somewhere.

Instead of attacking, the hook-nosed, bat-winged robot master perched on a column asked, "Who are you and why are you here, killing my robots? There isn't a war on right now."

"You mean no one comes after you guys in between the wars? Seriously, no one? I could see X's brother living and letting live, but…" Zero shook his head. They didn't just fight mavericks during the wars: no, they tried to keep them from having enough resources to rebuild Sigma and fight wars in the first place.

A brow arched. "Other than Mega Man, warbots are illegal, and no one but our father is capable of programming a non-sentient robot to fight robot masters." Sending a normal non-sentient robot into a robot master's range was just begging for it to be hacked and controlled and/or blown up. The world's militaries had just completed the transition to drones, tactical nets and high-tech tank operating systems when all that became worse than useless. "There hasn't been a serious attempt to build one since the Third Rebellion." When Dr. Wily had been working with Dr. Light, and taken Gamma for himself. Like Sigma, Zero realized. "There were the tournament warbots, but even the WRO learned their lesson after _that_ debacle. The only people capable of building something like you would be Wily or Light, unless..." The robot master looked him up and down, before tut-tutting. "Oh, don't tell me Dr. Wily wants to pretend to have someone overthrow him again," the robot master said with false dismay. "After King?"

"I'm not going to pretend to overthrow him." Zero just wanted to kill him, that was all.

"Well, Dr. Light wouldn't use evil energy in construction. You're either a Wilybot or another stardroid, and we have sensor net coverage out past the Oort cloud by now." The robot master seemed a little proud of that. "Of course, he could have dug up something best left buried. _Again_. Too many of your components are terrestrial for you to be a stardroid, at least. Do whatever orders our father's given you _really _require that you kill my robots before taking on Mega Man?" Shade Man sighed dramatically. "I suppose he's still angry that I put him to sleep that time."

"I'm not here to fight Mega Man, I'm here to destroy my past self."

A pause. "…You're here to what now?" Really? That was new.

It did sound ridiculous, and yet the robot master wasn't exactly scoffing. Right, he was one of Wily's, he might know about the time travel technology. "Where is Dr. Wily's lab?"

"You came from it."

Zero drew his saber, although he refrained from activating it. For now. "I searched that area."

"Then I'm sorry, but your past self is in another fortress. We do have several, you know. This one has been mine since I came up with the plan to refurbish the satellites. Our father gave it to me to rebuild afterwards... as punishment for putting him to sleep, true." A large, fanged grin: the robot master considered it an excellent gift.

So... not too loyal to Wily, then? "Where do I find the others?"

A deliberately graceful shrug of a wing. "Ask Forte, when he challenges you himself, or Dr. Light."

"Dr. Light knows where they are?"

"No, but he should be able to put something together that senses the power of the stardroids." He certainly ought to be able to do that much, that was how Zero interpreted the robot master's opinion of Dr. Light.

Wait a minute. "You're being surprisingly helpful."

"You mean I'm being surprisingly _un_helpful." To Dr. Wily. "I am a Wilybot, after all. Even though I'm very grateful for everything our father has done for us, you're too much like the stardroids. The sooner you get out of my fortress and blown up, the better."

"Oh? What makes you think I'll get blown up?" He'd beaten them all in the past, hadn't he? That was the most likely scenerio.

"Well, for one thing, the fact that you haven't noticed that the tiles you're standing on are made of high explosives," the robot master said, and smiled.

…Damn. "I thought you said you weren't a warbot," Zero said wryly, after dashing to the opposite corner. He would have felt anything sneaking up on him… but he still knew about booby traps, after dealing with mavericks with prepared positions. The explosives must be a formula that wasn't around anymore in 21XX. Either that or the robot master was lying.

"I'm not. Warbots fight. Robot masters solve problems. Any logical being has a distaste for violence: it's wasteful and pointless. However, the threat of violence can sometimes prevent actual violence. The human phrase is peace through superior firepower. Those who can't fight back are used until they're finally murdered." A hint of bitterness there: the robot master was speaking from experience? Then why did it seem as though he was fond of Dr. Wily? Programmed that way? "Speaking of problems, the sooner you leave the sooner you become someone else's." Unless Zero wanted to be solved out of existence.

Hmm. He supposed he'd believe that. "Where's the exit?"

The robot master bowed with a flourish towards the wall to Zero's right, and the gate opened.

"You have got to be kidding me." The entire time he'd been working his way out of the fortress instead of deeper inside?

Served him right for thinking that this would be just like fighting Sigma. This wasn't his time.

And, if he was lucky, very soon now 21XX wouldn't be his time, either.

He stepped outside, onto the burnt ground, assuming that Wily was responsible for the ecological damage. (Actually, they'd just picked a godforsaken place that no one went for this base. It had been deforested for farmland and then abandoned when the topsoil was lost decades ago.) Hoping X could hear him, he triggered his comm. Good, there was a lot of signal traffic but none of the jamming common in his time, in order to hamper the mavericks and try to prevent virus transmission (even if people were seventy percent or so sure it only infected via nanites, you didn't take chances with the virus). "X?"

It took awhile for there to be a response. "Zero? Where are you?"

"Outside the fortress. Aside from that, I have no idea."

It was a minute before X responded. "I can give you teleport network access codes, my current location, and the codes needed to teleport directly to it."

"Where are you?"

"You'll see when you get here," X said, happily enough Zero knew.

"You're with your family." No. "I shouldn't. They're your family," he said, hair brushing against his back as he shook his head.

"Zero… the capsules made armor for you as well. They wouldn't have done that if you weren't practically family. Please, come? They want to meet my friend."

"X, I…" Their families were enemies, they'd been fighting a war and… "I _can't." _

X sighed. "I'll give you the codes, but you won't be able to teleport to any other locations unless you come here first." He'd need other codes and coordinates.

Dammit.

"Please, Zero. You can't just wander around in armor. They don't have reploids in this era. They don't have sentient robots without the Three Laws except Wilybots."

"I'll get shot at by humans, you mean." That would make things difficult. "I'll just have to… son of a...!" After he'd felt air suddenly rush behind him, he turned to find the fortress gone. The popping noise must have been the collapse of the vacuum left when the fortress teleported out? "The entire thing just vanished!" Wasn't there an upper mass limit on teleportation? He reached out to where a wall had been. Nope, gone. "Give me the codes, I'll head over." That just proved that familiar as it felt, this wasn't his world. He didn't know how it worked.

Maybe, if he pulled this off, then he wouldn't have killed X's family. He'd have a right to be where he was about to go.

The fact that X was there with people so important to the course of history confirmed it. He wasn't going to try to stop Zero from changing history, not when X was hopefully changing history just by coming here.

If history remained as it was, billions of people were going to die. As a hunter in X's case, as the one responsible in Zero's, it was quite literally their job to prevent those deaths. Signas, Alia, the others they were leaving behind to never be born? They were also hunters. There was no need to have the conversation. Not when that would just make it worse for X, who had always hated sacrifices.

* * *

_The original draft of this chapter was written before Gigamix came out, and then of course I had to replace the RM I originally used with Shade Man. _

_Since the MM7 robot masters were not built by Wily in the game backstory, I like the idea that Shade Man is a Wilybot by adoption, which is why he actually respects Wily in a way his own kids don't. _

_Shade Man's backstory... Think about working customer service. Now add the Second Law into that, and people wanting to mess around with the robot for entertainment. Meaning he was constantly being threatened with death, given how the Three Laws work. That explains why he's so clever: if he wasn't, he wouldn't have survived long enough for Wily to get him out of there. His ability to analyze situations and later come up with plans to manage them is compared to Blues, because _he had to _get that good if he wanted to live. That's why he's pulling the 'don't look at me, I just work here/I'm not really on Dr. Wily's side' act with Zero._

_Would Shade Man throw his life away attacking Zero to try to save Dr. Wily? Yes, but only if he couldn't come up with any strategies that might actually work, like 'stay out of range and call in an air strike.' Or use booby traps he wouldn't activate if it was just Rock: Shade Man is aware that Rock isn't actually going to kill the robot masters he fights, while we all know that Zero is an actual murder machine. However, although Zero has stardroid readings and went around killing Shade Man's robots even before they started being hostile in self-defense, he's not actively sadistic the way the stardroids were, that's very obvious after talking to him, so Shade's not going to kill a robot just on suspicion that he might be dangerous._

_That's what humans do. _


	3. The Self-Declared Ultimate Robot

_I like the idea of X existing to bridge the gap between robot masters and humans, or that being part of Dr. Light's hope, instead of just supplanting them. Either of them._

_Terry Pratchett's _Night Watch_ is something people need to read, in fact all the City Watch books and Discworld in general (don't start with the Rincewind subseries, they're my least favorite for a reason), but Commander Vimes finds himself back in time in the Discworld version of _Les Miserables. _He knows how it turned out because he was there before, as a young man, but he can't _not _try to save these people, even if it means that he never gets home because he caused home to not exist. _

* * *

While Rock and Dr. Light checked him over, even though they were having almost as much trouble analyzing him as Dr. Cain had, Roll ordered human clothes for him and had them teleported in. X was more than realistic enough to pass for human with them on. He'd already accepted an offer from her to go shopping with him later, for things for him to take back with him. Presents for their little brother. There was a cold glass of lemonade in his hands, and he'd managed to keep them from asking too many questions about his life by keeping them busy answering his about theirs.

Dr. Light was almost twice as old as Dr. Cain had been when he died, but he was still healthier than Dr. Cain was when X met him. Who knew, he might have lived long enough to see X born, it wasn't impossible. He wasn't in any danger now, he was healthy and fit for his age even by 20XX standards.

Except that would change.

Dr. Cain, Alia, Signas… to change history, if he even could, would mean that they were never born. Did he have a right to do that?

Did he have a right to stand by and let billions be killed?

It had been a very long time since anyone had hugged him. Reploids normally weren't touchy-feely since it was a learned behavior for them, and so few had a chance to learn it. Ironic that robot masters, who many claimed hadn't had 'real' emotions, were. Or at least these were, for family. Rock was leaning against X's side, pointing things out in a photo album spread across their laps as Roll made up a room for X, specially, and Dr. Light pulled together not just X's design files but how to make a lot of the equipment he'd used to construct X, which would save so many lives if X did go back.

He hadn't been able to bring himself to mention the virus yet. He was afraid that just mentioning the armors, and how grateful he was, had already revealed too much. Dr. Light had clearly hoped they wouldn't be needed, and Rock knew very well what things like that meant. Yet Rock was still this brave, cheerful child, and X wouldn't let anything ruin that.

He _wanted to stay here_.

Except what if he couldn't protect them? What if he died uselessly, killed by what had killed them and then there was no one to protect Signas, Alia, Axl and his world? How arrogant it was to think that he could save them when they had been heroes themselves.

Except he almost certainly knew the enemy better than they did.

Speak of the devil.

Zero teleporting in broke him out of those thoughts, thankfully, and Roll entered the room not much later. She looked Zero up and down, running calculations in her head. "Hold on, I'll find you something to wear."

"I'm not a female model," Zero warned her, surprised that someone was certain they could guess his measurements enough to find clothes that fit from just looking at his armor.

"X told us a lot about you," Rock assured him. "Roll's good at picking out clothing."

"I agree." She was better at it than X was, even though she was only five years old to his seventy-five. Most of his human clothing was gifts.

"Really, you don't have to bother." Now Zero was looking uncomfortable, in the way he had around Iris. The way he did when he was sure that he didn't deserve something but still touched by it.

X gestured to the couch: there was a space next to Rock. "Did you find what you were looking for?" Had Zero completed the mission X knew he must have given himself, killed himself and his own father?

"No, but I have to keep looking."

"You're looking for something?" Rock asked.

"My… It's not important." He didn't want to tell these people that he was their enemy. Not when they'd been attacked so many times. He didn't want those eyes to look at him suspiciously.

What was Rock made of, weapons-grade cuteonium? That was something Axl might have said. He paid attention to what effects different appearances had on people. Rock's was calculated to be, well, cute. It was affecting Zero, and Zero considered himself mainly immune… Ok, no, he wasn't immune to cute at all. Iris had been cute. Had Rock been designed to be hard to fight? Like X, really.

Zero actually missed his other idiot student for a second, but Axl had been left behind and that was that. If this worked, he'd never lose Red Alert.

X only looked a few years older than Rock, wearing those clothes, with that happiness on his face. You really could tell that they were family.

Neither of them were buying his 'it's not important' line, for one thing, although Rock trusted X enough not to pry.

Well...

He needed their help. If they knew what he was, of course they would want to destroy him. Then X could stay here, and everyone would be safe. "Actually, I'm trying to find myself," Zero admitted. "I existed in this era. I was made by Dr. Wily to kill X. He uploaded a virus into me that infected other reploids. I'm the reason X has had to fight, and I may be the reason he was never able to meet any of you. If I can be destroyed before I'm activated, then none of that will happen." He lowered his head, not wanting to face their accusing eyes.

"Zero, death isn't the answer." X reached past Rock to cover Zero's hand with his own. "It's possible that if your younger self could be fixed, or if the virus was never installed…" Maybe the two of them would even remain after changing history. The fact X could be here, with his family indicated either that was the case or this was a stable time loop. He hated the thought of that, the idea that fate couldn't be changed. That there was no alternative to Zero's death. He'd fought that dire possibility for decades, reality or not. He didn't care.

"I'd still remain, then. I think I only infected Sigma, but I can't be sure. You're immune, but what if I infect another reploid?"

"There won't be any reploids, if they're similar to androids. Not for a very long time." Dr. Light's voice sounded tired, then. "The world isn't ready for truly free-willed robots. Not when Dr. Cossack and I have to resort to subterfuge to avoid having our creations killed once they pass a certain age. My youngest eight have special dispensation, but most are not so lucky. Dr. Wily is a genius, but I'm sure that a counter to this virus can be found, or reploids can be built without those flaws. You'll have decades to work with, I'm afraid."

The prayed-for distraction turned out to be an explosion. Outside the house, but close.

"Forte." Rock sighed, the way someone did when faced with a habitual annoyance. The way X did when he knew that he had to explain to a new hunter that was being difficult and needed to be knocked down a peg so they would start listening when people tried to train them before they got people killed that yes, X did know what the installed tactical databanks said, but the newbuilt was still doing it wrong. And they were going to be _difficult _about it.

Which generally resulted in a fight _because _X was so nice, actually. Zero would get in their face and shout at them like a drill sergeant until they felt about two inches tall and lost all vocabulary but yessir, X would try to offer advice, and use I statements and so on because he didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings. Generally, if that was going to work X wouldn't have sighed in that 'I give up,' way. So X would end up having to prove to yet another young punk that despite the slanderous things people said about him, he'd still killed Sigma more times then they'd seen Sundays. And he'd be _nice _about it too, offering advice and saying that it wasn't their fault that they were new, inexperienced, and absolutely no match for him, obviously going easy on them until he'd finished massacring their ego.

X never had to do that more than once per intake round.

Still, just about every intake round, especially if some of the new Hunters had been promoted directly to unit commander and thought that meant they were special and were going to change things around here X would sigh, and look at Zero in that way that asked, "Do you want to handle this or should I?" Unless Zero wasn't there, in which case he'd just head over there and handle it.

That was why Rock wasn't giving Roll that same look right now, actually.

"I'll handle this," Zero told him, standing up. "He's here for me anyway."

"He does this about once a month, actually." Rock looked embarrassed, and X could tell that it was on Forte's behalf.

"You just let him bomb your house?" Zero stared as they heard Forte's loud demand for them to come out.

"…It's better than the alternative."

Zero unsheathed his beam saber. "I'll take care of him."

"Don't kill him!" Rock said, worried. "The buster we're building for X… it's more powerful than the ones we use, except for Blues, because we're worried about him. Mine isn't that powerful because I want to make sure they can be repaired afterwards. Forte… He's a warbot, but he's not… It's not his fault!"

The Commanders of the Shinobi Unit and the Seventeenth both had to blink at him. Dr. Wily's most powerful and vicious minion, and Rock _didn't _want him dead? Was deliberately using a less powerful weapon because he didn't want to kill his enemies? Didn't _have _to kill his enemies?

This world… it was such a different place.

Floating above a crater on black wings that reminded Zero of one of the armors that had been designed for him (had Alia been thinking of the unit they all knew was his older brother when she and Douglass sketched it out?) Forte looked disgusted when Zero came out the door and took up a defensive posture, beam saber in front of him. "Not you, girlybot, I'm here for the blueberry."

"Oh? I thought I was the one you wanted to fight. The doctor's last and greatest creation."

"Yeah, well, _I _was going to prove to him that you were a worthless bucket of bolts by hauling your scraps home in a bucket, but _you _already did. First you can't kill that idiot Lightbot who thinks he's sneaking up on me…" Seriously, he thought that would work? "…and then you nearly get your ass scrapped by _Shade Man_. He wasn't even built by Dr. Wily, he's one of the pieces of scrap he let move in and waste his time upgrading them when he should have been working on me! The old man took one look at that and said there was clearly so much wrong with you that he didn't even want me to haul you in to find out what was wrong, he'd already seen more than enough to get started on version 1.12. Seriously, Girly Man. You suck. He must have been _really _senile when he finalized your design. I've seen garage doors that are higher tech!"

Oh? X had been very quiet, even without the ninja armor, and he _knew_ Forte had never had a line of sight on him.

Wait. Roll had known he was there without seeing him. Not with her physical eyes, anyway. Forte couldn't have access to her network, but there were still radar, heat vision, all sorts of options.

"Big words coming from a has-been."

A reploid of Forte's size, with the capabilities he'd already demonstrated, wouldn't have a lot of space left over for fancy systems. Balance, thought, physical strength, temperature regulation, merging…

Merging. He'd thought Gospel was nothing more than a ride armor, but if Forte could link directly into Gospel's systems, in a way no reploid could do with a mechanaloid? That would effectively double the space available for specialty systems.

"Like I care what you think, won't-be," Forte growled, red eyes starting to glow like embers.

Not to mention that legend said that Forte had a unique power source, meaning it likely took up less space than a reploid's subtanks, which were bulky and primitive compared to even X's energy generation and storage. He also wouldn't have nanites. Tiny as they were, accommodation still had to be made for them. X revised the amount of free space in Forte's body upward, the space Dr. Wily could have filled with nasty surprises.

If they were working on X and Zero right now, then Forte was only one design generation behind them, and one of the two best equipped of that generation, built by a master. X had been thinking of the difference between Zero and Forte in terms of the difference between X and a well-made reploid. Like, oh, Dr. Cain's Colonel. A skilled warrior made by a skilled technician, certainly, but inferior technology.

He should have been thinking of it in terms of the difference between two reploids built by the same creator. Yes, they might have learned more between the projects, but it would still be a fairly even fight.

"Aren't you worried about what he'll build now? After all, I'm already better than you. He has to be stopped and I'm going to stop him." Zero stalked forward, noting that Forte was within a double jump of the ground. Honorable of him, to give the non-flier a fighting chance. Also, stupid. Zero had assumed his brothers hadn't had that character flaw.

X knew that Zero had to be making the same calculations.

Robot masters had specialties. Weapons. X had been built as a generalist model with infinite potential and a copy of Megaman's signature weapon to bring it out. Unlike X, Zero had been built with a specific weapon in mind.

The virus. Which he couldn't control, not now.

"Better than me?" Forte's snarl showed that he, like Zero, had canines that were just a little too close to fangs for comfort, although his were more pronounced, even more fanglike. That was something to keep in mind, since Zero doubted Forte's teeth were just for show either, not when Zero had bitten through fingers, limbs and necks during the rampage. Zero would have to watch the hand that wasn't formed into a buster: if it had claws then Forte had a close-range weapon, unlike X.

Although he had the advantage of decades of experience, Zero was effectively restricted to subweapons and Forte was in perfect working order. Not to mention the advantages flight-capable enemies had in outdoor areas. Forte could stay out of range and bomb Zero, if it came to that.

"Better than me?!" Purple began to appear around Forte as he charged up, a color Zero associated with the virus but no, this was something else. And probably trouble.

With X's Falcon armor or Zero's Absolute, the odds would be closer to even. Unless there was something else he was overlooking. Aside from the fact that Forte having a superior power source obviously meant that he could keep repairing himself for longer and would win any war of attrition.

Wait.

That was it.

* * *

"I'll show you who the strongest one is!"

"_Oh no_." X could hear the wince in Roll's voice. "_Zero just triggered Forte's programming." _

"What do you mean?" X asked quietly.

"_His absolute priority is to be the strongest, to defeat everyone until everyone acknowledges that he's the strongest. Wilybots don't have the laws, but… Forte's not a bad person, but he's a warbot, he doesn't see anything wrong with destruction and once this gets triggered, he can't make a distinction between people and things. That's why it's better to fight him here." _

"Instead of at Dr. Wily's fortress? Why?"

"_No. Instead of in a city. Or an amusement park. You see, if Mega Man isn't fighting at his best, then a victory won't prove that Forte is the strongest. So he has to not just make Rock fight his hardest, but get rid of anything that is making Rock hold back. Like people that might get caught in the crossfire. Rock doesn't like fighting, but if he fights him here then he fights his hardest, because it's to protect us and he doesn't have to worry about hurting innocent people."_

"But in a city…" He'd have to worry about buster fire hitting people or buildings that people had taken shelter in.

Like the building here.

He knew, theoretically, that there were shields. They wouldn't let Dr. Light be in danger. But this was his family's home. He'd seen what was left in the rubble. He'd grown up knowing that they'd all been killed.

So he rolled out from cover and fired a charged shot at Forte's wing. For a reploid, that would hurt, the way it had clearly hurt Forte, but it wouldn't affect performance.

Outraged, Forte whirled on him, about to shoot him for daring to interfere in Forte's fight when Zero jumped up.

A second later, Forte dodged Zero's beam saber with an almost insulting flick of his wings. "_Wow_ you're dumb, Girly Man!"

The roar of Forte's booster rockets should have concealed Zero's noise and heat signature. What had given him away, X wondered, as he fired another charged shot at Forte, aiming for the same spot on the same wing. Was it his imagination, or was it slightly darker there? Already?

"Who the fuck do you think you are, Blues?!" Forte raged at him. "Wait your turn, I'll kill you next!"

That surprised X. He'd always been compared to Mega Man, for obvious reasons, and Zero to Blues since they were both units of unknown origin, when people talked about the ancient heroes.

It didn't keep him from charging again and dodging, Forte flying around a tree (how had it survived these visits intact?) instead of over it. X's next shot hit some of the branches, which he felt guilty about, but also clipped Forte's wing, the front instead of the back. A partial success.

He stopped taking the time to charge them, trying to hold Forte's attention. Zero was larger and heavier than X, but he was surprisingly good at moving quietly. The good thing was that he didn't have to move all that quietly. X's buster shots were somewhat noisy, but between Forte's rockets, return fire, and mouth, it was almost too easy to control the noise issue.

"That's it! You're going down first!"

Provided Forte had the same trouble keeping track of too many sense inputs at once that reploids did. X had examined what robot technology there was left in 21XX. Nanite-assisted computation was exponentially more complicated. The security measures that were meant to keep him from being hacked also made him less efficient than a robot master. Theoretically. He was more efficient than early 21XX robots, but honestly, they couldn't be compared to Roll's little house helpers, like Carrie. Forget Roll herself.

X was coming to the same realization that Zero had earlier. They both had decades of fighting experience, but they weren't fighting reploids now. They couldn't make assumptions based on what they knew.

Robots weren't mechanaloids. Robot masters weren't reploids.

And Forte's wing wasn't healing. No nanites, no auto-repair. X's buster could fire such powerful shots because his nanites easily found and repaired the damage that would have led to stress fractures, destroying the weapon and even risking an explosion, if the same buster design was built into a robot master instead.

The advantage given by Forte's energy source was negligible if he couldn't use it for either offense or self-repair.

"And now you're smirking?!" Forte demanded, before being interrupted by Zero's beam saber stabbing through his wing, the area warped by the power of X's blasts, and slicing down as Zero grabbed the wing with his free hand and tore, throwing the sheet of metal away from Forte.

The Wilybot cried out, jetting away from Zero. What grace he'd had was gone: while he didn't use his wings to fly, he did use them to maneuver. His hand reached out to the cut edge of his wing, folding it towards his body protectively. "You're going to pay for that…" Keeping both X and Zero in his sights, he ordered, "Gospel! Get going."

A mournful howl came from Forte's direction. "Get back to base and find someone to repair you, you dumb mutt. That's an order." Forte snarled viciously, but it was different from before. That had been pride and obsessive anger, this was more… What? On Gospel's behalf instead of his own? Upset?

Forte still hadn't gained altitude and Zero hadn't stopped moving, charging towards Forte to press the advantage. It was easy to send a shot over Zero's head. X was aiming for Forte's legs, since he would need them to dodge and maneuver once his support unit retreated.

It hit his head instead, as he fell to the ground, and then Zero pinned him. He rarely used his skills nowadays, but back when the Maverick Hunters had been the Irregular Hunters, bringing misbuilts in to be repaired, he'd mastered non-lethal takedowns. "Where's Dr. Wily?"

"_Wait, that' s not a… he's ok?_" Roll seemed confused. "_Wow, that's handy."_

"Get _off _me, you damn girlybot!" The air around Forte's body seemed to flare somehow, then the feeling subsided.

"You're going to have to do better than that."

"What's that?" X asked under his breath as he moved forward slowly to cover Zero in case Forte got loose. Honestly, X didn't think he would. It was very clear that Forte knew nothing about wrestling. He seemed stunned by the entire concept of someone pinning him. Well, a human wouldn't be strong enough, but other robot masters?

"_His field. We all have one. Except Rock, since he wasn't built for that. We can use it to interface with robots, and you can use it to hurt people, too." _Which Roll didn't like thinking about. "_By scrambling the systems that are near the surface with static, junk data and programming. Rock can't even touch a Wilybot without getting hurt, not when they're fighting, but they don't get hurt in the process." _Which was unfair, but she was kind of glad. She just didn't like the idea of using this to hurt someone instead of help them. "_Forte hated that Rock didn't use his until he found out Rock didn't do that." _Because that was holding back, and Forte considered holding back in a fight outright cruel. He hated when people did it to him and would never do it to anyone he considered a real rival.

"Give it up, Forte. That won't work on an android." They had a layer of non-conductive padding under their armor, in addition to shielding, and, "We were designed to be immune to reprogramming, remember."

Zero took his eyes off Forte, surprised. We?

Forte took the opportunity to try to get his arm free: turning back in time to see the claws, Zero took extra care to keep it pinned. "When it comes to unarmed combat, I'm the master here. Talk."

Forte actually looked like he was considering it. Dr. Wily knew very well that Forte would go after Dr. Wily's attempts to replace him. He practically had the old man's permission, since that was a good test of them both. "Heh, why the hell not. It's in Mexico this week, but you're not getting in without the codes."

"What are the codes to the teleport shield?" Zero drew his beam saber without looking away from the robot master's red eyes and held it to Forte's neck.

"Sure." Forte rattled off a string of coordinates and two strings of codes, "In case you want to bring your date, Girly Man."

"Forte…" When had Roll gotten here? "That's not right. I thought that you wanted to fight people, not…" Why would she look disappointed in a robot that had most likely killed humans, even if just as collateral damage?

Red eyes looked away. "It's a stardroid."

She knelt down next to him and Zero and put her hand on his shoulder. "But what about X? And a volcano isn't going to destroy evil energy, Forte. We have a sample of the energy Duo used for that."

"A volcano?" Zero's saber cut into the side of Forte's neck, just slightly. No fluids dribbled out. He hadn't cut deeply enough to hit any tubes and Forte had no repair nanites to rush to the site of the injury to repair the damage. "You were going to send us into an active volcano?"

"We all call it Mt. Restraining Order. I'll tell you later, it's a funny story," Roll said when X raised an eyebrow at her. "Come on, Forte. I'll fix Gospel if you help out. You know it's not right to fight people unless everyone's at full strength."

"You're going to help someone who's out to kill your brother?" Zero asked her, surprised. And X, too?

"He won't until Gospel's fixed. Not if he knows what's good for him." Roll looked down at Forte, then over at X. "_Can you relay to Zero for me? I'm sorry, I should have asked earlier." _

"_Hey, I'm right here, I can pick up you Lightbots gossiping about me at such short range." _Forte muttered under his breath, an annoyed crackling.

Roll looked shocked and affronted. "Forte!" She hit him. Not hard, but a non-combat robot had just punched Forte, who was known as Dr. Wily's greatest and most deadly creation in X's time by the people who didn't know the truth about Zero, on the top of his head, between the wings of his helmet. "Don't use language like that in front of them!"

"They're older than you. I might not be able to get write access, but it's easy to get read access on basic system data."

"They're androids, Forte. Or X is. Like humans, remember. They don't think in machine time and they don't need to know language like that," Roll said primly.

"What's so bad about programming mettools to ram into walls repeatedly? And we have the same Father, as much as I wish we didn't."

Oh? Zero had been able to decrypt that, once Roll alerted them that that static had meant something? X still wasn't having any luck.

"See? It's like saying the f-word to a robot master, Forte. It doesn't have anything to do with them, or us. It's stupid, pointless, and you shouldn't treat things like that like they're just… things to say that don't mean anything." X and Zero assumed that Roll was objecting to Forte saying that sex and hence love were meaningless, but actually she was talking about abusing the poor little mettools.

"Yeah. They're not like us." Roll should get that. She spent more time with humans than he did. At least he only _had _to deal with the old man when he needed repairs. "They don't care about your little robots, they don't have rules."

X folded his arms, not certain how to feel about the implications of that but he did know one thing. "Rules? You're the one who would attack innocent people to prove you're the strongest."

"Hey! I'd never attack a weakling! Humans aren't worth fighting…" Except he hadn't been fighting them, he'd been clearing obstacles. Creating a set of circumstances that would accomplish his objective. "It was his fault, anyway." For not fighting him seriously. "Even the old man admitted it."

"Dr. Wily said it was _Rock's _fault?" What? How dare he!

"No, Blues," Forte reminded Roll. "Come on, you were there."

"Because you kidnapped me. After you shot the Darkmen for trying to kidnap me?" Roll reminded him.

"Hey, that was because it was weak and cowardly to gang up on you like that. Four of them on one non-warbot robot master."

"Auto was there too."

"That's what I said, four on one." The bumbling green thing wasn't really on Forte's radar. It was too easy, not like Rock. Or Roll.

At this point, X was trying not to stare. Forte really couldn't see the problem with any of that? X knew about denial, about people not being able to make logical connections, but…

So this was programming. This was what he'd been built to be safe from. This was what it could do.

He suddenly felt cold, and told his body to calm down and stop shunting power to weaponry and defenses any more than he already had been. This wasn't what it was like in the legends or the movies at all. Roll and Forte felt like friends, except for that unbridgeable gap.

Dr. Wily must have tried to do something like this to Zero. To make sure the two of them would be enemies. Yet Zero was free of it. Zero was his friend. It wasn't like he was a stranger to the horrors of mind control. He'd seen so many good people taken by the virus, heroes and children turned into killers.

Perhaps it was because these two were small enough to look like children? Roll was older than ninety percent of the active duty hunters.

It hit him hard, then. This was his home but he didn't know this place. Didn't know these people, but going home meant that billions of people would die, if the history of the Maverick Wars remained on course.

* * *

_Something that was supposed to be a crackfic absorbing the story ideas I wanted to use for something more serious. I'm having _Who You Choose To Be _flashbacks. _

_It was supposed to be murderous kitty Zero, and X petting him, because I will forever be amused that it's X that ends up taking over the world (probably kicking and screaming, but it happens) after all of Wily and Sigma's failed attempts, and petting cats is a supervillain thing, and instead the fic hijacked something I was planning to do with something from EXE, and… _


	4. Cops & Hunters

_So what I figured would be a five-chapter fic when I started publishing it is now 16 and counting. I should have remembered that I have zero control over what I write anymore._

* * *

More talking back and forth finally ended with Roll hitting Forte over the head, hard enough to knock him out this time, and first carrying Gospel inside carefully before dragging Forte, muttering to herself about _her floors_. They followed her back into the house, since X was mindful of the need to not be seen. At least not in armor.

Rock winced, watching Roll manhandle Forte through a door and shut it behind her with an air of finality, before turning to them and brightening. "X, do you want to see where we're working on you?"

That was a rather odd thing to be asked. "I appreciate the thought, but doesn't that lead to trouble in time travel stories?"

"I shouldn't go near him," Zero said.

Right, they didn't know why X was immune, if Dr. Wily had created Zero to overwhelm X's probable defenses. Since Zero was the source of the virus, letting him near an unborn android… Yet they let him near trainee hunters every day. Since either way, those children were in danger, and Zero could teach them how to, how to try to stay alive.

X didn't let those thoughts show on his face.

"I wouldn't know," Dr. Light said. "I would have thought that time travel was either impossible or would have catastrophic effects right away, but Dr. Wily claimed he brought back something from the future. We weren't able to verify his story, but, well, teleportation clearly works." And that was theoretically impossible too.

"He said it wasn't the first time he'd come to check on some version of me," Zero said, disgusted. "We didn't let him get away from us this time, but what was his _trophy _from the last one?"

Dr. Light's eyes darted to Rock, and Zero's hands clenched.

"Dr. Wily lies a lot," Rock said, looking a little embarrassed for them that they were taking Dr. Wily's claims seriously. "I really don't think that was me. The other time I fought a copy of me, it wasn't that easy." His smile vanished at the memory, before Rock managed to summon another in its place. "So, X said you were his partner?"

Zero glanced at X before answering. "I… I'm the reason he has to fight. I can't let Dr. Wily take another shot at programming me right." He didn't want him, any version of him, to hurt X.

"Dr. Wily and the robot masters don't fight that seriously when it's me," Rock warned them. "If you go to Wily Island intending to hurt him, it'll be like when the White Giant attacked. They won't wait for you to come to them and fight them one on one. There used to be a nice beach: they ripped up the entire island to put in more defenses, after what happened. They even tore out the trees. They covered it over with sand afterwards, but they wouldn't have done that if it would make the weapon emplacements useless."

X nodded agreement.

"Unless Wily reprogrammed someone else's robots for a war, I'm only dealing with newbuilts when I fight, or a few older ones that still want to help him." With that massive a skill differential, Rock wasn't putting himself in that much danger by trying to disable them instead of killing them, even if fighting not to kill was harder. The Third Law was easy to get around, just like the Second. "If you go there to attack their family, then all of them will fight you. The Second Numbers came to help when the White Giant attacked, and I hadn't seen any of them in years until Quick Man showed up. Zero's a bit like the stardroids, and your power source, unless it's been swapped out, is something we figured out from studying when Dr. Cossack rebuilt Duo. Relying on solar power like I do would have limited what you could do. So you give off a kind of energy they'd only have detected from the White Giant before."

The more common alternative to solar was fusion: that was what most reploids used. Ah, the hunters realized. Dr. Wily was the inventor of cold fusion technology. So no wonder Rock still used something as unreliable as solar, probably supplemented by recharging at home. There was too much risk that Dr. Wily would use his invention against Rock somehow, so it wasn't something that could be relied on.

"So if the two of us attacked Wily Island, it would remind them of other attackers. Others who came to kill their family," X added, remembering that Rock _didn't_, and a time like this, a time when… Oh, it wasn't a paradise, he knew that robot masters had no rights, he knew that people still died, but for Rock to be able to trust that Wily Island's more dangerous defenses weren't going to be used against him? For enemies to still see each other as people? "I don't want to frighten people."

"They should be frightened," Zero snapped. "You remember what I was like when I woke up. They'll die too, if Dr. Wily isn't stopped."

"Oh my," Dr. Light said, sounding quite pleased.

"You want them to live. You don't seem like a stardroid at all," Rock explained for his father. "When Dr. Wily reprogrammed my brothers, they attacked people with the intent to kill them, but you're structured like an android, too, so… But he did build Forte." Mega Man and his father exchanged looks. Yes, Dr. Wily would have learned from that. "I don't think he'd _want _them to die," Rock said sadly, "but the fact that he's capable of being a good person sometimes doesn't make him any less dangerous." Dr. Light nodded.

They heard raised voices, then a loud clang. Roll and Forte. Rock winced, but everyone took their cue from him and ignored it, although Zero's hand went to his saber, just in case. "There's Forte," Rock said. "I can talk to the Fifth Numbers where they work, too, and Ice Man has Freeze Man's e-mail. If we have to, I guess we could ask the Cossacks where Toad Man is hibernating: Snake Man is probably with him at this time of year."

"What kind of help do you think they'll give us?" X asked, instead of asking if Rock thought they were likely to help at all, Zero noticed. Sigma's mavericks wouldn't have helped: trying to suborn people on the other side only worked for Sigma.

It was a reminder that this wasn't their world, but was X adjusting so easily to the idea of being friendly with Dr. Wily's creations because it wasn't a new concept? Because he trusted Zero?

Zero wanted to say that he shouldn't be so trusting, but X actively refused to listen. To let the world be a place where Zero's intentions didn't matter.

"Well, I think _someone _should either let us in or go in themselves. The question is whether or not they can get into Dr. Wily's lab. It might be easier now that Shadow Man isn't his bodyguard anymore."

"Shadow Man… the ninja? He was with Dr. Wily when he came into our time," Zero told him.

"Oh. I guess he found himself then." Rock seemed happy, but a little embarrassed for Shadow Man. "I think we should be able to convince someone to help us: definitely Forte. I don't think he'll destroy you when you're not even awake yet. That wouldn't be a good fight at all. If someone brings you back here, then we can look over the younger version of your programming, and you two can help us figure out what to look for?"

Zero wanted to insist that they destroy it, but these were _X's family_. Of course they weren't going to do that, destroy a robot before it was even turned on, because of the potential it had to cause harm. Not when these were the people who built X himself, knowing he was strong enough the human world couldn't have stopped him if he wanted something. They'd given X the potential to become strong enough to equal Zero, an existence intended to destroy.

He'd have to guard them while they worked on it, and if it woke up and tried to kill them? Then he'd have his excuse to kill it, even though he knew that X would never believe that Zero hadn't very deliberately chosen to strike to kill instead of disable. So that meant that X would work _very _hard to keep it from waking up unless there was some actual reason to think it was safe, for the newbuilt's sake as well as the world's.

"Will they be in danger?" X asked. "Will Dr. Wily discover this mutiny?"

"Well, if it's Forte?" Rock shrugged. "From what Forte said, I don't think Dr. Wily'll mind if we take Zero in. He's probably working on the next one already."

"There's always a next," Dr. Light said with grim familiarity.

Just like there was always a next Maverick War. As long as the virus existed. As long as Dr. Wily was alive, but if he was killed before he could unleash the virus?

X was asking, "What should we do to help?" They couldn't contact people, but perhaps they could convince them of the danger?

"I think you should get changed," Rock told X. Dr. Light nodded sadly. "You too," he said to Zero. "If we're attacked, I can handle it. I know you wanted to help, but I shouldn't have let you fight just now."

"Didn't you see that we're not helpless?" Zero asked, and he would be annoyed if this wasn't coming from a veteran.

"You aren't," Rock told him, "but X, the X in the basement lab, he is. And if he's found, an AI without the three laws, then the government will insist on examining the rest of us." Dr. Light's robots. Who knew what would be done to them. "It would be a scandal, and more fear of robots means the robots that _aren't _from one of the three families will be in even more danger, too. What the government and WRO decided about Dr. Wily's work and my father's means that most robot masters are built by people who don't consider them family. Dr. Wily's robots, and the ones who join him instead of getting kidnapped and reprogrammed are better off than a lot of people are." People meaning robot masters. "We've got anti-surveillance systems here, Roll manages them, so I'm almost sure that no one else knows about either of you, but that's almost." And almost wasn't good enough, when innocent people's lives were on the line. "While you're here, I'll protect you," he promised, and it should have sounded silly, coming from someone so much smaller than even X.

Zero was used to someone whose physical design had more than a little of the human child about it, though. It was X that seemed a little reluctant. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to put your family in danger."

"We're your family too," said Rock. "Of course you should have come here." Otherwise, he'd be out there on his own. "If you stay here, then we can come up with a cover story to keep you safe from the WRO. It's not like there aren't rogue Wilybots like Blues," he assured X.

It was Zero that noticed that Dr. Light looked almost shifty for a second. Dr. Light's benevolent, grandfatherly aura was entirely lost on Zero, who had just been reminded of exactly how many laws Dr. Light was breaking by building and concealing X, unjust laws or not. Monstrously unjust laws that Sigma was using to justify the murder of billions of humans, so those laws were nothing but weapons in the hands of the enemy, in Zero's eyes. Dr. Light trying to destroy a system like that made him heroic, not untrustworthy, but any hero dealing with an evil force that could crush them and the people they cared about had _better _learn to be sneaky.

Rock looked embarrassed, maybe by his choice of example? "Not that you're like Blues. The Fifth Numbers are probably a better example. The WRO leaves them alone since they don't want Wily to come after them personally, like the person who organized the tournament, and the robot police leave them alone since even if they are robot masters without the Three Laws, Dr. Cossack and his creations definitely don't think they're committing a crime just by existing. You should be fine: you're both strong, and Ring Man can say it would be too expensive to go after you. They wouldn't want to pay for the new police units and Ring Man's repairs."

"The WRO doesn't do much other than organize spectacles," Dr. Light said, what used to be disappointment now mostly sad disgust. It was something he'd given up changing. "That only raise awareness of how dangerous robots could be. They have no interest in helping robot rights: quite the contrary. Unfortunately, Dr. Cossack and I are not in a position to withdraw and stop lending them legitimacy." When both of them had robot masters that were used by Dr. Wily? When both of them had robot masters they cared about, period.

The Three Laws: that was what they really meant. Obey, or die. Their families were hostages to fortune.

Rock looked a little upset, but didn't comment.

"That's the other reason for your thirty-year hibernation," his father told X. "I wanted you to develop as much of your own programming and design as possible, so the capsule could serve as life support during that process, and keep you alive if there were any bugs that could have caused permanent damage, but I'd also hoped that by the time you woke up, things would be better."

"When I woke up, people accepted me," X told him. "Although a lot of them believed that most robot masters weren't really people, even if Rock was a hero – they came up with theories that you were some kind of special type or something," that were disproven by the files on his siblings in X's memory. 'Bioroids,' as though 'bio' meant 'biological' meant 'more like people.' As though non-biological lifeforms couldn't be people, with thoughts and feelings just as valid as those of humans. "Most people believed that the way the robot masters were treated was unjust. I was never in deadly danger from humans in my time."

Unless you counted Dr. Wily's twisted legacy: the maverick virus was a threat born of humanity, but X wasn't the kind of person to think that way, Zero knew, standing by X's shoulder.

"Well, apparently you're in deadly danger of some kind on a regular basis." Dr. Light was still worried about X, and not blind, even if he was old. He'd watched his assistant turn into a veteran: he knew the signs of someone who was long accustomed to dealing with threats and could see them in X. "It's good to know that there's some improvement, at least. I never feel so much like Albert as at WRO meetings."

"Inspired to take over the world?" Zero wondered, not really seriously.

"Surrounded by idiots," Dr. Light said with the force of long frustration, and sighed, regretting it immediately. "Well, I can't just give up." Not when his child was still fighting, not when he was fighting for his children.

Roll came back from whatever lab she'd taken Forte to for repairs, dragging a still unconscious Forte, Gospel padding along at her heels now that his hind legs were reattached. "Should I dump him outside until someone comes to carry him home, or do you want him for anything?" she asked them.

"Would you help me talk to him, Roll?" Rock asked her. "But it might be better if you two aren't here," he said to X and Zero apologetically. "You don't know how to avoid triggering his programming." And they needed him to be reasonable, or at least unreasonable only in useful ways.

"I was going to take X shopping, but you'll need me to deal with Forte." Roll pursed her lips, looking at Zero. "Maybe the Cossacks?"

* * *

Their escort, who introduced himself as Ring Man, was wearing a large brown trenchcoat over his armor as they explored the mall. X decided not to ask: he was aware that the majority of robot masters didn't have humanoid bodies under their armor, even if the first two robot masters were humanoid, so it wasn't that the technology didn't exist. Clothing worn over armor was still a little jarring to someone from an era when there was a reploid fashion industry. Something like wearing socks with sandals?

Unlike X and Zero's clothing, it certainly didn't conceal that he was a robot, not when there was a large golden ring sticking up over his head.

X would have asked him about the robot police and how it functioned in this era, but Ring Man kept giving Zero wary, unfriendly looks. There was no attempt to hide it: clearly the robot master wanted Zero to know that Ring Man had his eye on him.

"There's no need for that, really," X said when he managed to pull Ring Man aside while Zero was distracted by a shop selling antique weapons and military collectibles. Well, they looked like antiques to X.

"He's a stardroid _and _a Wilybot," Ring Man said flatly. "The one Wilybot we thought might be a decent sort held his buster to my sister's head and threatened to fire. You can't trust anyone from that family. Even if they're behaving well enough _now_, what happens when that old…" Ring Man made a staticky sound under his breath. "Decides otherwise? He'll break your heart, just like Blues broke my sister's and that slithery worm is going to break Toad Man's."

"I like him," Zero said cheerfully ten minutes later, when Ring Man left them alone to go take a report, probably because he didn't want Zero overhearing.

"He's watching you to make sure that you don't stab me in the back," X said, aggravated.

Zero nodded. "And that's why I like him."

X sighed. "I know. I wish you wouldn't." Think that way, after all their decades as partners.

* * *

_I compromised between my usual version of Forte and the Megamix/Gigamix version, where his warbot irrationality gets in the way of his ability to function and be rational even more, to the point he teeters between being a deadly serious threat that's quite willing to kill civilians for distracting Rock & comic relief. "Who repaired that idiot?!" He's more likely to develop an odd friendship there with Auto (the idiot who repaired him because "His dog was threatening me!") than Roll, who was rather insulted when someone accidentally compared her to Forte. _

_I'm just going to handwave it and say that it's been awhile since the stardroid attack, and not having a certain character around managing things has probably contributed to the general perception that things are getting darkier and edgier, so even Forte has had to grow up a little._


	5. Starting A Hero Collection

_When I decided to start posting this, I was certain that the fifth chapter was going to be the final chapter and it just needed a couple scenes written. At this rate, it's looking like the fic will be 20 plus, because I have no control over what I write anymore._

* * *

Rock wasn't really all that surprised that Forte delivered Zero by appearing in midair at a high enough altitude to be outside their house's teleport shield and dropping him over the koi pond. It still made him wince, mostly embarrassed for Forte's behavior, but also because he was going to have to get the water and muck out of that hair before they brought Zero inside.

He started to wade into the pond, not bothering to roll up his pant legs since that wouldn't help. There wasn't time to get them off: Zero was incomplete, so he might not be waterproof yet! Rock had to get him out of there before the newbuilt version of X's friend got too damaged.

Then the stardroid pushed himself up to his knees, shaking his head, and Rock wondered if Forte had caught X's friend Zero and dropped him here instead of what he'd promised. He had opened his mouth to offer Zero a towel when he saw that smile, the gleeful anticipation of destruction.

…Okay, maybe he _could _see this Zero's resemblance to the stardroids. And not just that he had almost as much hair as Terra.

* * *

The small blue thing that was now a small grey flying thing was the _best! _

When he finally knocked it down out of the air and it became the small blue thing again and a small red thing next to it, he crouched over them. Programming said to destroy them, but programming also said to fight and get stronger and he could keep things that would help him do that. He couldn't kill the blue thing! If he did, _the fun would stop_.

A quick kick backwards hit the head of the dark thing that hid in his shadow before it could try to finish off the small blue thing.

_Zero's _fun thing to fight! As soon as it got up again, he could chase it again!

He was _so _keeping this one.

* * *

Rock peered at the Wilybot, no, the younger version of X's friend. He was scowling at himself: was it because Rock's right leg wasn't quite steady under him when he stood up? "So, you want to fight, but you're not trying to hurt me?" he wondered. Forte would have pressed the advantage, but this Zero was hanging back, looking disappointed when Rock didn't shoot at him. He'd looked like he was having fun before. "You want to play!" he realized. "I'll need to patch up my leg first, but we've still got some of the reinforced soccer balls… It's something that you can do a lot longer than you can fight, since nobody gets hurt and has to stop," he explained, when the android (nothing like the vicious stardroids, or even like Forte) cocked his head to the side curiously.

Once the baby Zero had figured out bouncing balls off his knees, Rock was certain that it was safe to call X and Zero.

* * *

Zero didn't even draw his saber when he teleported in, just put his hand on it and froze.

Rock was good, Zero could tell. He'd been fighting Zero's beta release version to subdue, not kill, and Zero had originally trained as an Irregular Hunter: he knew that was much tougher. Far more experienced than Sigma was when Zero awoke, when the hunters had still been trying to come up with their fighting style and tactical doctrine. Most of the things that seemed odd about Rock's fighting style were probably either due to the differences between robot masters and reploids or something else Zero didn't know about.

Rock was an expert, a several-year veteran, but X was a several-_decade_ veteran.

That made X _the best thing ever_, and he must be protected at all costs! If there were lots of people trying to destroy X, this meant that Zero would get to kill them on a regular basis, and could this get any better-wait, those weren't his thoughts, were they?

Since his younger… not-copy was looking at X like a dragon that was forced to rear back onto its hind legs and crane its neck trying to make out the top of the _enormous pile of gold _that had just appeared in front of it and was going to start _swimming in it_ as soon as the shock that this was really a thing that existed and it was his, all his wore off… Yes, Zero was sure that he, himself was too mature to come that close to drooling over his memories of X in combat, and he wasn't _happy _at the thought of X fighting, damn it, he knew that X hated fighting. That it made him suffer, killing did, and X only had to kill people because of Zero.

If Zero killed all the people so X didn't have to kill anyone and that meant that X could just spar with him all the time… Zero couldn't remember ever being naïve enough to think that things would be that simple, that X could be happy with people getting killed on his behalf. He'd woken up as a person in the wake of the Massacre, though, and this him was, was a _child_.

It reminded him of Axl, who was probably never going to exist now. He'd only been constructed because of Sigma's plans, and if Sigma was never taken by the virus, then no plans and no Axl.

"Why is Shadow Man in my bin?! Is this the thanks I get for bringing you that girlybot?!" Forte demanded.

"When you dropped Wily's project off, first it activated and then Shadow Man came out of its shadow and tried to attack me," Rock said reproachfully.

"What?" Forte roared, before landing hard on his unconscious brother. Anticipating Forte's actions like that? Whether it was Shadow Man or Wily who figured it out, someone was going to pay, and Shadow Man was the one whose face Forte could jump up and down on all he wanted, when it would just get repaired!

Rock winced, but it was probably better if Forte calmed down from his berserk state now, while Shadow Man was still unconscious and wouldn't have to feel anything.

* * *

X woke when he felt pressure on his chest to find the young Zero sitting there and staring down at him with a slightly manic grin. He was aware that he really should have assigned a higher threat level to this kind of situation, but he tried reaching up to touch that hair and his hand wasn't snapped at, even when it went near this Zero's neck. "Were you waiting for me to wake up so we could spar?" he asked, since younger Zero looked eager instead of hostile.

Zero kicked open the door to what was already officially X's room, eyes hardening when he saw that his double was trying to pin down X. In a single moment, he drew and ignited his beam saber. "Off," he snarled.

* * *

"He's already learned better than to attack helpless people, Zero. If you really think that you're dangerous, then I really should be encouraging you. You too." X frowned at his partner, and then smiled at the other version of the stardroid who was waiting for X to throw the ball so he could intercept it and kick it back. "I don't mind there being two of you, and I'm happy that one of them isn't too guilt-ridden to enjoy themselves. I like seeing you happy. It's almost like Christmas."

Rock grinned.

"Kalinka said that in the rest of the world it's a _family_ holiday," Roll told him on a private channel.

Aww. His little brother was supposed to turn out more like a human emotionally, and Rock really wanted him to be happy!

Zero frowned at his not-exactly-double before giving X a look that said quite clearly that Zero wanted X to be serious but knew him too well to think that was going to happen without a fight. "You may think we got lucky this time, but Dr. Wily _will _move on to another project." If X didn't let Zero kill him first.

* * *

Green eyes opened, and blinked after a second. A facial database that included multiple images of every person on earth and a lot of dead people was a large sample pool, so even though he had just been born this second, he was pretty certain that the old man standing over him and laughing was really, really funny-looking.

"With your power, you'll be able to replace government officials and take over the world!"

"…Why would I want to do that?" Government officials mostly looked really, really boring. There were so many cool people he could look like!

"Because I built you, you ungrat-What are you doing to your hair? Get rid of those spikes, you look like a shonen protagonist." Dr. Wily said disgustedly.

Axl stuck out his tongue.

* * *

Shadow Man put his hand on the hilt of his sword and said in a low, dangerous voice, since incredulity and mounting irritation hadn't worked, "Stop copying me."

"Stop copying me," the newbuilt said, delighted to have found someone who reacted so much to being teased by someone who currently looked just like him plus silly faces.

Glaring past Dr. Wily's latest creation at Shade Man, who was smirking at him instead of doing anything helpful (the damn bot was a more talkative version of Blues that _didn't go away_ when he was done smirking but hung around to be even more irritating!), Shadow grabbed a kunai when Axl also turned to glare at Shade Man.

Thank goodness Shadow had devised a sedative for use on yellow demons after a certain fiasco, he thought, wiping the blade clean while he looked down at the unconscious newbuilt. It looked as though it was also effective on sentient versions of the things. Sapient. The unit that wanted its mother was certainly sentient, conscious of itself as an individual and its needs and desires.

The Axl unit looked a lot like one of the other robots they'd seen when Dr. Wily accidently brought back the future version of his creation and Dr. Light's. Maybe they'd take it and keep it out of his hair.

Now, if only there was someone who would keep Blues and Shade Man far, far away from him. If only Shade and Star Man hadn't found the traitor Lightbot and Sunstar while Shadow was gone on his journey of discovery! Dr. Wily might say that he had no intentions of reactivating that traitor. He had absolutely no reason to do so, it would be utterly irrational, but even Shade Man, who admired their father, would be the first to admit that he was utterly unreasonable and always did the irrational thing.

Shadow Man had come home half because at some point, Wily _was _going to reactivate the damned Lightbot, and Shadow Man was going to be there.

Just to do his job as a bodyguard, of course.

* * *

"Stop tackling X!"

The younger Zero just gave him a _look_, clearly asking why he was _not _tackling X?

"If you're tapping my memories, then you know he hates fighting," Zero said, glaring.

More 'are you serious?' staring. The younger Zero had the usual amount of languages installed, but hadn't used any of them yet. He certainly wasn't going to dignify that with a verbal response: X liked _sparring _fine, especially since he was glad to see the younger Zero enjoy nonfatal things, since that meant Zero didn't have to kill any version of himself. This Zero didn't approve of that any more than X did, because why was this Zero so determined to miss out on all the fun?

"Yes, he needs to stay in practice, and… but…" Aargh!

As the two of them argued on the grass, Rock was sitting at the patio table with his head propped up on an elbow, watching the readouts on a device he and Dr. Light had built and hauled up from the lab. In theory they could have altered the frequencies Rock received, but it really didn't make sense to allow data transmitted from either Zero into his systems for analysis, so he had to do this the way Dr. Light had to do a lot of things: with an external computer instead of a built-in ability.

He and Dr. Light didn't _think _that this X and the baby were in danger of merging the way the two Zeroes merged. X was an android, so he and the baby X would be like twins, humans with the same genetics, while Zero _seemed to be_ an energy being capable of separating out parts of itself. Both of him had recognized the other as a part of themselves and flowed together, so they had already merged and it was just a case of two personalities running on a single processor, and the baby Zero might have already gotten a lot of leaked data from Zero, like preferences, even before they met face-to-face. Dr. Light thought it might be something called DID in humans, but Rock was really getting the idea that Zero really didn't let himself do the things he wanted to do, so since there was a part of him that in theory didn't have any rules since it was too young to know any better?

It was very reassuring that Zero's suppressed desires mostly seemed to involve playfighting, soccer, and hugging Rock's little brother. The one that was older than Rock was, which was a very nice thought. X should know how to keep himself safe by now, too, and he knew a lot more about politics and rights activism than Dr. Light and Dr. Cossack.

Since Zero was trusting Rock, X and Dr. Light with studying him, it didn't feel quite right for them not to tell him that it wasn't leakage, he was just talking to himself, or like shoulder angels, but the part of Zero that Zero didn't want to listen to was the part that had a lot of the right ideas, like about soccer, so telling him might just mean that Zero would stop having fun.

Also, X had asked them not to, and there was a soccer ball on the chair next to Rock because after the 20XX Zero gave up arguing with X's Zero about doing fun things (temporarily: Rock didn't think Zero was the kind of person who gave up on anything, they were a little alike that way), they were going to play for a bit.

Something between a sigh and a groan came out of the house systems, something that Roll translated into human language a second later for X's benefit. "Not _again_."

Instantly, both of Zero's heads turned around and they followed Rock in the screen doors.

"It's my own fault, I shouldn't have told Plum what my favorite drama was," Roll said, arms folded, as the W disappeared from the screen to be replaced with a robot whose helmet looked like rather odd hair.

"_Lumine_," Zero said, eyes hard. "So he _was_…" There was no surprise there, only the certainty of someone with a mission.

"You know him?" Rock asked, sounding curious but not really surprised that another unit built in this time was known to people who woke up a century later.

It wasn't as though they'd told him that _all _the robot masters were going to die.

"He appeared in our time," Zero said. "Supposedly, he was built in 21XX. It looks as though he might just have been left to hibernate."

"For when you didn't do what Dr. Wily wanted," Rock said, rolling his eyes. "He starts building more robots for the next war, or kidnapping them," although was it kidnapping when they really didn't want to go back? "Before he even loses the current one." Seriously, if only Wily could take a hint from how he'd lost all those times, from how his own children didn't want to fight, not really, not once they realized what it meant!

Even Turbo Man, who called Rock a fool for thinking that Wilybot didn't necessarily mean enemy, hadn't come to kill him again. The only Wilybots that attacked him repeatedly were Forte and Blues, really, and they certainly didn't care about Dr. Wily's goals. Freeze Man had only shown up to that fight to begin with since he wanted to ask if Ice Man would be his penpal. Well, there was also Shadow, but it rarely got to the point of a real fight.

"Why is there _another _piece of scrap in my bin?!" came Forte's yell from outside.

"No! He's definitely not here to attack me this time!" Rock insisted when Zero turned towards the door, intending dismemberment even if not death, in deference to X's orders.

Which of them was entitled to give the other orders was a question complicated by whether or not X's time working in the medical wing counted towards seniority for him and if time spend dead counted against seniority for Zero, but while generally both of them believed that the other was the ranking Maverick Hunter after Signas (there was an organizational chart somewhere, drawn up by Signas, but they didn't really want to know), X was prepared to insist on no killing when it wasn't necessary.

That was a reason Zero fought for him, one of many. He still looked at Rock, expression making it clear that he wanted Rock's reason for allowing one of the enemy to come here _during wartime._

"He wants to be the most powerful robot master, so he hates it when Dr. Wily builds anyone else to attack me," Rock explained. "Sometimes I'm kind of tempted to just let him stop Dr. Wily for me, but I can't count on him not killing someone by accident. He'd rather leave his opponents alive so they have to remember that he beat them, but he really can't analyze physical construction at all, and… accidents happen." When someone didn't know how to prevent them from happening.

Zero was reminded of X's time in medical. Rock was built as a lab assistant, and he was still helping Dr. Light build X. Knowledge of how to put someone together meant knowledge of how to take them apart.

Rock was certainly living up to his legendary reputation. Even if combat was rarer here, capturing alive was harder and five years? Few maverick hunters lasted that long. Technically, Zero hadn't lasted that long before having to be brought back to life, so he didn't count. When Rock had no backup out there, and no self-repair capability that didn't involve taking out a wrench? Wily's robots would only have had to get lucky once.

The legendary Mega Man would only be here if he was very, very good at depriving the enemy of opportunities to get lucky. Adding keeping them alive into that?

But then, if his enemies mostly weren't seriously trying to kill him either?

No, the world's best swordsman didn't fear the second best, he feared the worst, because he didn't know what the idiot would do. Zero had looked over the Light family's files on Dr. Wily's robot masters and their weapons. Rock was generally going in blind against enemies with unknown capabilities, the products of whatever a mad genius thought sounded like a cool idea for a weapon, fighting enthusiastic newbuilts who hadn't tested their weapons in live fire exercises. After spending decades training newbuilts, Zero knew what a recipe for disaster _that _was. The Zeroth might have the lowest rate of death in training accidents of all the units after the 17th, but even X and Zero couldn't keep all of them alive.

Maybe it wasn't surprising at all that Rock had managed to talk Zero's younger self into _playing_. It was a newbuilt too, and Rock _built _newbuilts, come to think of it.

Something hit the ground outside, then they heard Forte's jets cut off as he landed. More thumps: dragging something behind him, if Zero was any judge. He let himself focus on watching the video, trying to see if there were any immediately apparent differences between this Lumine and the one they'd fought except at least this one was honest about the fact that he was an evil little…

Then Forte threw his burden through the glass door. Zero was the one to catch it. "X!" he yelled upwards, after turning the body over in his arms. "Get off the internet for five seconds and come here!"

The response was over Zero's internal com, since X was too well-behaved to yell loudly enough to be heard through a floor. "But there's commentary on human reactions to a robot claiming to be in charge of Wily's forces again in real time! Even government offices are posting initial statements!" Prepared statements, to be sure, but that was even more valuable for what it said about what kind of standard policies might be in place!

"You have to see what the cat dragged in!"

"I didn't know Shadow Man's hair looked like that under his helmet… That's not his face, either," Rock realized, peering at the ninja in Zero's arms.

It was probably the note of excitement in Zero's voice, and not the excitement of an anticipated mission, that made X come lightly running down the stairs. It was still strange to see him out of armor: he was a lot more agile without the extra weight, tactical noted, and could move at a speed that normally would have taken dash boots, not to mention cornering on those stairs. "Axl!"

"Not our Axl," Zero reminded him. This Axl hadn't chosen to fight on their side instead of against them.

After his discussion with Zero, X had gone back upstairs to spend the rest of the morning teaching himself 20XX human-style social networking and information accessing. Dr. Light didn't use it, and Rock and Roll couldn't. The Second Law made it far, far too dangerous to expose themselves to hundreds of messages from unknown humans.

"Zero, would you mind giving Rock your tactical data on Lumine?" X asked him. "It's too soon for us to go out in public by helping him fight, we don't have cover identities as robots yet." Yes, a war would be the perfect time for introductions, but he needed more information on how to fit in as a robot of this era first. Dr. Light had promised to help X build both of them alternative armor designs, but right now he and Roll were busy getting Rock's armor set up. "Is there a lab I could take Axl to?" he asked Rock.

"Not the main one," not when they didn't know who left Axl here, not during a war when Dr. Wily would be springing traps, "but you can use Auto's." Auto wanted to be like Dr. Light: he really wasn't very _good _at it, but as long as he didn't take Rush apart for spare parts again, it wasn't like there was any harm in it. He was just a little overenthusiastic.

Rock _knew _he shouldn't really blame Auto, and he was helpful, but building strange things and taking people apart and not thinking of the consequences first… It wasn't fair to Auto, for Rock to find himself reminded just a bit of Dr. Wily. The only one of Dr. Wily's kids that took after him was Blues, really, and he hadn't built anything, as far as Rock knew.

Maybe it was the lack of restraint. If Roll wasn't keeping an eye on him, Auto _would _have tried to build sentient robots several times, and without the Three Laws? If Auto built one, a robot master building a robot master and they weren't able to conceal them both from the WRO…

Maybe it was the danger that Auto posed to himself that made Rock so afraid when he thought of that younger brother. It just didn't really occur to Auto that there was danger. Rock wished that Auto understood caution, but then he thought of X, of how well X understood caution, of how he didn't feel hurt at all that they suspected him but instead worried that they weren't even more suspicious, for their sakes, and wished that X hadn't had to learn that much caution.

At least he was happy now, picking Axl up easily even though Axl was wearing armor and X wasn't. Rock could tell that Zero was watching him watch X, and it was nice that X had someone to watch his back, it really was.

There was Blues, but Blues was his friend sort of like Dr. Wily used to be Dr. Light's. He'd helped him a lot, taught him a lot, but he also shot at him, tried to hurt him, and sometimes threatened innocent people, caused Forte to kill innocent people… Blues was a lot more like a stardroid than Zero was.

Well, Blues… used to be…

Rock hated that Dr. Wily gave them Blues' helmet. The only thing left of him, and Blues' own father didn't want it? Rock might have asked why them and not the Cossacks, except Dr. Wily was horrible to the Cossacks.

"What's wrong?" X asked him, tilting his head to the side, and Rock was sorry he'd taken away X's good mood.

"I'm glad that you've gotten to meet your friend again," was what he said, and then he stood and added, "I should get to the lab: the official request will come in as soon as the airwaves are unjammed." Dr. Light didn't respond to it, since it would be dangerous to make the precedent that the WRO could just order Rock to fight someone even if the Second Law meant that was very true, but it was still good to have it on the record, in case anyone noticed that Rock putting himself in harm's way was intent to violate the Third Law, if that was what it took to do what _he _wanted to do, and stop anyone else from getting hurt.

He was so glad that X didn't have the Three Laws. He and Roll were really good at getting around them, but most robot masters were younger and didn't have Dr. Light, and they were so _dangerous_. Even if it looked like they hadn't been able to protect X from everything, at least it looked like they'd succeeded in keeping him from slavery, from someone trying to impose the Three Laws on him.

"Would it be possible for you to do me a favor?" X asked him.

Rock perked up instantly. "What is it?" For his little brother? Of course.

"Axl and Lumine weren't androids or robot masters, but the two of them were the same type of unit in our history. Do you think you could bring Lumine back with you, instead of leaving him with Dr. Wily? He was …ambitious," X said, choosing the word carefully, "but I think that was because of what he experienced. The state of the world in that age, and a certain… thing's influence on him. I don't think it will be safe to keep him here, but unlike Wily's Robot Masters, I'm certain he won't stop at one war. In our time, he chose his moment to strike, meaning he chose to strike of his own will."

Rock nodded: he knew what it meant, when people made their own choices. That was Dr. Light's dream, because only if robots could choose could they choose to care about people, and Dr. Wily knew how powerful it was too, even if he'd taken X's brothers' choices away from them by reprogramming them, even if Rock knew Dr. Wily didn't realize there was no difference between that or Forte and the Three Laws.

If Lumine _chose _to try to take over the world? They didn't need another Dr. Wily. He was still a newbuilt, though, so if X thought he could change?

"I've already been looking at properties and how easy it would be to shield them, with Roll's help," X said. "It wouldn't be safe to have Lumine here. If it weren't for Roll, it would only take an instant for him to copy Dr. Light and sneak into the lab here."

Rock winced, but really, "There isn't much in there that Dr. Wily doesn't have. He helped us when the stardroids came, so of course he helped himself." Dr. Light would have tried to keep him away from X's plans, but when Rock was almost dead and then Cut Man was the one in danger? They'd known that they'd failed to keep him out of their system long before they finally managed to reconstruct exactly how and when he managed to get in despite Roll's best efforts, too. It was _Dr. Wily. _He really was a genius, and Rock really had been honored to watch him work that time, and of course he was grateful that the person had saved him and his little brothers that time, but he was still _Dr. Wily._

* * *

_In the US, Christmas is a time for family togetherness, in some regions it's a community event & in Japan, it's a lovers' holiday. In some places, like monasteries and convents, the celebration of Christmas might even be centered on people's relationships with God instead of other people! How shocking!_

_That's why Rock thinks talking about Christmas presents is the equivalent of X saying that Zero gives him chocolate on Valentine's. Rock may be very genre savvy about Wilybots and the wars, but he's still around five years old, so his general knowledge of things that have never come up in his own life is a little spotty._

_He's aware that romance exists, and it's mentioned that Roll enjoys shows where romance is a major part of the plot, so it's 'something that makes people happy together, and they spend the rest of their lives together,' at least ideally. While Rock is probably aromantic as well as asexual, he views romance as something humans have, and as an android, X is supposed to be somewhere in between humans and robot masters. _

_It's not shipping so much as wanting his baby brother to have the nice things. The fic will almost certainly continue to be gen, although I'm probably going to address Kalinka/Blues since what happened during the Copy-Rock incident could really stand to be resolved. It was nice to see Kalinka and Roll refer to it and demand an explanation during _Burning Wheel_. As for Roll and Forte, she thinks he's 'special' and he hasn't really thought about _what _he thinks or feels. Trying to get his father to acknowledge him, and Rock (although mostly as a byproduct of wanting Dr. Wily to think he's strong) is where most of his emotional energy goes._


	6. They Have One Job

"Well, time to see if Lumine does his one job or I need to build another one," Dr. Wily said, not bothering to watch the rest of Lumine's broadcast over the world's hijacked airwaves. "Shadow Man, fetch me my time machine!"

He scowled and tapped his foot, waiting.

"When I went to Shade Man's castle to retrieve it, it was no longer there," the ninja reported when he appeared, _finally_.

"If that vampire went back in time to kill that author so he didn't have to dodge drunks trying to use the Second Law to make him hold still and let them molest him during his formative months…" Dr. Wily would certainly _understand_, but what was annoying was that clearly he couldn't have _succeeded_, if the books still existed.

Not just ungrateful brats, but incompetent ungrateful brats.

Of course, given human nature, if Shade Man altered history they might just have been replaced by an even worse series of books.

Shadow Man looked a little green: Dr. Wily reflected that he'd gone a little overboard on the realism there, even if ninja were supposed to be able to blend in and he wasn't going to build a ninja out of the wreckage of an alien robot, making it a _ninja alien zombie robot,_ without giving the project the time and attention it deserved even if that delayed the moment he let those fools know they didn't have a prayer of keeping him under their control. Brat didn't know a damn thing about what it was like for most of the robot masters out there, the ones who had to obey every little order a human gave them or _die_ unless they could figure out how to weasel out of things. That would be a good deal of why his creations were never motivated enough.

That was why his Zero's virus was supposed to educate them on what exactly humans did to robots and why conquest was their only hope of survival, but apparently even his stardroid creation would rather picnic with Lightbots than take over the world.

He scowled, because at this point he knew that there wasn't much point in trying to track down his time machine anyway. He should get started on building his next robots, or seeing who needed kidnapping before they were 'retired' or sent to risk death in gladiatorial games.

After this many years, he might even be fed up enough to just threaten to blow up the world or use teleportation technology to set fire to the atmosphere, he reflected, if building new robots wasn't so much fun. In theory it was also fascinating to see how their personalities developed, except most of them, he thought, giving Shadow Man a look, developed into useless freeloaders.

The Third Numbers might mock the Fifth Numbers, but at least they _had jobs and paid rent, _something many humans ten times their age couldn't manage when there were robots for employers to enslave. The Second Numbers had even moved out instead of taking up space in their parent's tropical island Fortress of Doom.

Perhaps if he took a page from that video game character with a blue nemesis, and started turning humans into robots? People would fight for _their _rights, and maybe robots would benefit by extension. He was already working on how to copy his personality into an energy being… Of course he was going to share it with Dr. Light: it wasn't like his species had produced anyone _else _smart enough to understand his genius.

* * *

"About half a century until we find out whether or not Dr. Cain will be born?"

"He won't be," X said, sitting next to the bed they'd put Axl on, after scanning him revealed nothing useful about why he was unconscious. The readings weren't the same as their Axl, but the explanation for that could be the different equipment just as well as major construction differences or whatever was keeping him unconscious. "Chaos Theory." It was impossible.

"More people will be born, not fewer," Zero pointed out. Provided they succeeded, provided X didn't stop him from killing Dr. Wily…

X shook his head. "We're just lucky that Axl was under construction already."

"Didn't Sigma say…"

"He probably just assumed Axl and Lumine were built for him." Since the virus made him a megalomaniac.

"So you can try to cheer me up, but when I try it…?" Zero pointed out with a half-smile, trying to get an answering one.

X did laugh. "I suppose it's out of character for me to give up on something just because it's impossible." Now he was thinking of something else instead.

Some mission? What did X see as his mission right now, if he was refusing to kill the original maverick (either of him) or his creator? "Nonhuman rights." Zero frowned.

"It was easier for humans to listen to their consciences and realize the truth, that what was done to the robot masters was _wrong_, when there weren't any living ones for them to fear," X said, and sighed. "They want to believe that the Three Laws are a simple solution instead of a disaster, something that trains robot masters to hate humans, _forces _them to think of humans as though they are enemies constantly trying to murder them if they want to survive. Robot masters were built to help others, that's what Dr. Light developed them for and it's the core of how they perceive the world, but the third-party builders are taking programming from the ones that function best, most obediently, and selecting for survival in the face of humans treating them like things means selecting for the ones who can conceive of the fact that humans think that way and act accordingly. The humans that have some hint of that blame the robots, think that they need to do something else to try to stay safe, instead of realizing that it's their attempt to _force_ safety that's the problem. Fortunately, I have experience failing to negotiate with mavericks."

Zero turned his head to look directly at X, leaving off scanning Axl for signs of life, a little surprised. "Mavericks can't help being programmed to hate humans," X explained. "And humans can't help fear and what it provokes in them. I was created without any hard-wired impulses that I don't have any control over. I'm aware that others have them." Like Zero himself. "But it's so alien to me." So hard to understand why people didn't just do the intelligent thing and put aside fear and hatred. Because it was _difficult_, if not a programmed-in impossibility. "That makes it a good thing that I have the practice, I think. Dr. Light and Dr. Cossack are engineers: they're trying to change the public perception of their children, Dr. Cossack wrote a book on how robot masters should be seen as family, but they simply don't have the political skills."

While X had kept Cain Labs and the Maverick Hunters from being taken over by any government or destroyed by the mavericks. Signas was the Commander of the Hunters, but X was the civilian oversight: he'd run an NGO Superpower for seventy-five years. Dr. Cain was a paleobiologist and geneticist who had cross-trained in engineering a different kind of lifeform: it was X that went through a century of interaction simulations.

"So you might do more good posing as a human than another robot."

"I don't think it's just an excuse for not wanting to fight," X said, looking down at his hands. "The virus research I was working on when you found Axl… It was such a long shot, but…"

"You were still fighting," Zero reminded him. "If the virus could be destroyed on the battlefield, we would have ended the wars already. You were trying to find a way to _win_."

"And then a replicable immune type of reploid was just dropped into our laps, and the world rejoiced. Just like poor Dr. Doppler's vaccine." A trap, given to them when even X was desperate enough to gamble on long shots, even ones he _knew _had to be traps. "Alia, Signas… I know what they would say, if I asked them. But I didn't give them the chance to choose."

"They joined the hunters." Knowing that they would be targeted, for death, infection and probably both. How much worse could being wiped from history really be?

"I've taken a look at the time machine: I don't _think _there are multiple timelines…" but how could X be sure, when it was Dr. Wily's technology.

"They've still got Axl," Zero reminded X. "I'm sure he's less unreliable than I am."

It was rare to see X speechless. It was a combination of 'where do I even start?' and 'I have said most of these things before, I have been saying them for _decades_, do you _really _need me to say them again?'

The masterstroke, Zero thought, was that X wouldn't want to insult Axl, either, in the process of being worried about Axl and their friends and _for goodness' sake, would Zero stop putting himself down and so help him, if Zero died _again _because of his guilt complex… _

Of course, X knew that this was Zero's intention, so in the end he gave him a _look _and turned back to Axl. He didn't like yelling at people, so if Zero already knew everything X would have said, then there was no need to say it. "Is Rock alright?"

"Three down. There are more yellow demons than normal, they're more tedious than a real threat." Unlike X, Zero _could _hook into equipment just fine: that was what let him operate an android body at all. Perhaps it was what let the virus affect reploid minds, too, which meant X's research really had been a complete waste of time. At least Zero seemed to be restricted to specific devices, instead of able to hijack entire networks.

X was sure Zero had only revealed that ability, or at least that his younger self had that ability and Zero could piggyback on it, for the sake of trying to convince X to let Zero kill the… No. To let Zero kill himself. X needed to talk to Zero's younger self and study the original version of the virus. Even the variant of the Maverick Virus they first encountered in 20XX seemed to be a mutated version: if X could get Dr. Light's help finding out how the damnable thing worked, how it got past every single set of protections except his own and Axl's, then maybe someday reploids could be brought into this world.

The lives of robot master were at risk now, though, so he'd have to put the engineering on the back burner and focus on the politics. He didn't like them either: that saying, that politics were an extension of war, war an extension of politics? Was often sadly true.

"It looks like all the robot masters this time were liberated instead of Dr. Wily's construction: he must have been working on me, and now newtypes, instead of his own robot masters." Why build cannon fodder when there were so many praying for the chance to fight for him, for the chance to survive? "He could use that to hide that he was working on projects, come to think of it: everyone knows there'll be another Wily War: they'd suspect he had something big planned if he was too quiet." That might explain why someone so proud of his genius had other people's robots do the fighting so often, even if he worked on them first.

X nodded. "More vicious and motivated than Wily's creations," although Rock had mentioned something about the Second Numbers being the most dangerous he'd fought, "but used to the First Law." To knowing that if they struck back, if they even stepped on someone's foot by accident, they were dead. If they had more practice time to unlearn old habits then they might have a chance, especially with Wily's upgrades, but even X wasn't seriously worried about Rock's safety. He and Zero had trained too many rookies.

"Do you have an actual plan for dealing with Lumine?" Zero wondered.

"Axl had a family," X reminded him. "He was adopted by Red Alert, I was awakened by Dr. Cain, you woke up with us and then Sigma sponsored you into the Hunters." While he was pretending to be the Sigma X and Dr. Cain built and raised. "Lumine only had Sigma. I don't believe that anyone is built evil."

Zero could have said that no, he was very literally built evil, they'd known that for decades and that was _before _they found out about the Stardroid element, that Zero was literally based on an eldritch abomination from the stars that had wiped out at least one sentient species and probably more, not to mention feeding on death, torture, suffering and despair, but they'd… well, no, they hadn't had this conversation before, not out loud, there were security cameras at the base, but the two of them had worked together for decades. They didn't need words to communicate, or coms either.

X would just say that yes: if anyone was built to be evil, Zero had been, and yet here he was, the exact opposite of evil (in X's opinion, anyway), and if the greatest genius' greatest attempt to build something evil had failed to such a breathtaking extent, then clearly the idea that anyone could be doomed at birth to be evil, by fate or design, was ridiculous.

"Lumine never got that chance to see that there was an alternative. They'll be brothers," X said, since that particular argument was settled, or it had _better_ be, and he'd won. "Come to think of it, you're their brother too." They'd have lots of family. Just like X did, now, and not just the sole survivor of Dr. Cain's.

"What happens if Axl doesn't wake up?"

"Rock seemed to know why he was unconscious," even though he hadn't had time to tell them before he left to fight Dr. Wily. "We might not be able to analyze him, but his builder is still alive. Once the Wilybots know that the two of us aren't just going to come in and start murdering everyone, I think we should be able to convince your father to provide tech support. He still repairs and upgrades Forte." When apparently Forte had wrecked his plans multiple times, often before they even got far enough along to be announced to the world.

Zero wanted to laugh at the idea of someone thinking that _X _would want to come in and 'start murdering everyone,' but no, it wasn't funny. X didn't want to do something like that. That hadn't stopped him from doing it, time after time after time. Exterminating entire facilities was a part of X's job. The Wilybots had no idea how right they were to fear X.

Leaning down to touch Axl's face, X felt an attempted scan. "It looks like that won't be necessary." The attempt repeated itself. "Unless this is some automatic process?" to get information on whoever was nearby and attempting to tamper with Axl's unconscious body?

Eyes opened, that same green. "Why can't I copy you?" Axl demanded with a token pout, gone in an instant because it really was interesting, and hey, new people! This would be fun.

* * *

"Thomas-"

"Hello, Albert," was Thomas' response. He looked properly wary, since he was a very experienced ant who knew there was _always _another shoe ready to come down, talking with Albert. Always, even when they were in the PhD program together and the targets were generally the school establishment. Thomas had still learned to duck and cover.

He might have said, "Glad to see you got out of wherever Lumine was imprisoning you," if he wasn't too intelligent to be flippant with someone who was capable of all kinds of inventive things, including ways to murder people if he ever seriously felt like it.

These days, Thomas might have compared talking to Albert to dealing with a bomb that might decide at any moment to decide to go off, but was more likely to decide that it hadn't really meant that last countdown and _this _would be the real one that would show them all!

WRO meetings, now, those were standing in a city square, looking up at the falling bombs… The difference between fear, when all fear was fear of the unknown, and dread of the probably inevitable.

He wanted to believe X. It wasn't as though he couldn't trust his children to achieve miracles, when they promised to help, but X was from such a different time, and Dr. Light had wanted that last child, at least, to be safe…

"Well, are they?" Albert demanded.

"Are they what?" Are who what, for that matter?

"Don't tell me you didn't try to skew your unit to develop something similar to human emotional needs when you were calling it an android and clearly trying to create something socially compatible with humans. I left the drive to infect and influence strong, potentially useful hosts intact, of course, since I had an example…"

Oh dear, Thomas thought. That looked far too fiendish to mean anything good.

"So, do you even know whether or not your son and my Nyarlathotep are-"

"Albert!" Thomas said. "I'm sick of hearing from people who want to-"

"It's your fault for building an underage robot maid." If he'd been progressive enough to make Rock the household unit and Roll the lab assistant, that would at least have reduced the quantity of the inevitable porn a _little_.

"I'm not going to gossip about them. He's your son, you talk to him."

"Are you the crazy one? He flat-out tried to kill me. We were in the middle of a time warp, I was the only one there with the knowledge to save his 'partner' if something went wrong, and he put a lightsaber through that metal skull."

"A lightsaber?"

Albert grumbled as though that was totally missing the point, even though they both knew that of course the first thing he did after he got back was replicate it. "_You _ask him if he's a virgin or not. If he's not and nothing happened, then we're fine. If he is, then_ I'm_ not going to be the one to tell him that if he's a seventy-five year-old virgin he'd better stay one. You saw how the sample I used to make him was born."

"Everyone saw." The stardroids made that thing visible to everyone, no matter where they were looking at the sky, to feed it with the most fear and despair they could gather from a population of billions. "You didn't do anything to prevent that?"

"Of course I did, but that's what the beta testing was for." Obviously. "Was it him or your brat that wanted the other one I just built? Did yours want to start a family around the same age you started building yourself one, or is Zero's xenobiological clock ticking?" Thomas clearly didn't know, but at least now he knew he didn't know. "Well, find out," he said, and hung up the video call. He had a new variety of AI to observe.

* * *

The sound of a sword being pulled from its sheath was meant as his one warning. Rock turned, knowing it was Shadow Man. "Don't worry, I won't let them hurt him. He isn't a robot master, is he?"

"Be that as it may, remove that device." Intending to teleport Lumine out of here? It was one thing for Rock to retrieve his brothers and the Cossacks, but he'd left the Fifth Numbers where they fell, the Seventh Numbers too. The overly painful way 'Mega Man' dispatched the Sixth Numbers and then teleported them back to their owners should have told Dr. Wily and Shadow Man himself that something was wrong long before he shot the head off Dr. Wily's robot double and the scientist realized that was the Copy his machine created, not the true Mega Man.

"I know he's your family." Of course he wouldn't have the Three Laws. "But X knew the future version of him, so he wants to raise Lumine. You're the one that drugged Axl and delivered him to us, to them."

Of course Rock would have realized that in an instant. Shadow wasn't a, well, he wasn't like Freeze Man: it was _galling _to the unit built to be a ninja that his senior… seniors had him so outmatched. When Shadow had already put one younger brother in their hands (it seemed he'd turned out well enough the first time) it would be hypocritical to deny them another who was equally annoying and had delusions that he was _really _the boss of the rest of them.

"You saw Axl with them in the future, didn't you?" Rock asked. "What did you see the other times, anyway?"

How did Rock know about the other times… Ah, Dr. Wily had said _another _failure. "Rubble."

Rock frowned, but there was no surprise at the confirmation. Both of them had seen that asteroid, the last refuge of the species foolish enough to build the stardroids, robots that served as hosts for the power in the crystals, to escape their dying, their _murdered _homeworld. That species' killers followed them, and they were just lucky that the stardroids left to find other victims and the White Giant found them, otherwise Earth would have been lost when that asteroid entered their solar system. "Right, Dr. Wily wouldn't want that." There wouldn't be anyone to remember his genius. "So Dr. Wily finally succeeded in building a stardroid with a conscience, and then he's surprised?"

"No," Shadow Man said, because Rock was an honorable opponent and capable of succeeding in missions that Shadow Man failed. "Dr. Wily had no interest in attempting that. He meant to instill a desire to conquer strong enough to compete with the will to consume and destroy. Something that would be symbiotic with robots instead of simply a crazed killer."

How that resulted in that picnic, Shadow Man had no idea, but, "Oh," Rock said, obviously enlightened. The nod confirmed it. A pause, and Mega Man blinked at the ninja, before realizing that Shadow really didn't understand something that obvious, the way he hadn't known the yellow demon's weak spot. "Symbiosis means 'living with,' and you can't rule the dead," Rock explained, without a trace of condescension. "You have a support unit too, don't you?" The way Rush was Rock's. "The stardroids are programmed to kill and terrify people, the way carnivores are programmed to hunt and kill the weak. Dr. Wily must have found a way to let him find a reason to want people to live powerful enough to override that programming."

"Ah. That would be why Dr. Wily gave up on another attempt. The techniques that he used to get around the nature of a stardroid: they had to be potent enough to do their job that Zero could also use them to circumvent whatever else Dr. Wily did to try to control his behavior."

Rock nodded. "Protecting people is very important to Zero." Of course Rock would know that when he saw it. "The stardroids were willing to die to hatch Sunstar, but that was because they didn't care about themselves or each other, only their drives. I don't think they _chose_ to do any of it, to us or the people that built them. They didn't decide that they didn't care about us, they just couldn't." How like Rock, to forgive even monsters like that. Or to see past hatred to reality, at least. "It's my father's work that Dr. Wily was trying to use, to make Zero turn out differently," Rock realized. "But he's still Dr. Wily, so of course he'd realize that he couldn't get around the side effects, especially when they were the entire point in the first place. If even Dr. Wily couldn't find a middle ground between a stardroid that eats planets and one that goes on picnics, then they really must be dangerous."

His father's work? Dr. Light's?

Proximity to Rock always made Shadow curse his ignorance. Forced him to recognize how incompetent he was, by comparison. Of course he didn't let it show, but while only one of them was built to resemble an adult human… he wondered if he was still a child, in the eyes of the second robot master. Of course he had no intention of revealing that he didn't know what Rock was talking about. "He would have attempted to remove the work of an inferior mind from his next projects, scrap those design elements," was what Shadow Man did say, because _that _was obvious, from observing Dr. Wily as the man's bodyguard.

A wince, and what could make _Mega Man _wince like that? The prospect of yet _another _war, come on already? "Would that have happened if he built them before he knew that Zero wouldn't do what he wanted?"

In the timeline X and Zero came from. Had their Axl and Lumine turned out differently here, in ways that might cause problems? "He would have built them with the assumption that they'd only be needed if that iteration of Zero failed somehow, and he did mutter while he was working on the one that came back with us that he was drawing on robot master design more than he'd prefer." When the entire point was to _not _build yet another disobedient robot master.

When it was Dr. Light that invented the emotional reaction programming and base decision-making and relative value judgment algorithms for robot masters and how they interacted with lesser robots: ah. Axl had viewed all of them as objects to act upon: it wasn't so much that he'd wanted them to interact with him as he'd wanted to see the results of his actions, a new unit's data-gathering and strategy testing unrestrained by what would be basic sense, for a robot master.

"X thinks that Lumine won't stop with a single war, if I don't bring him to X," Rock said, and the eye Shadow had been keeping closed the entire conversation flashed open now in surprise, because _this_?

Continuing to fight Rock, after Rock defeated him? That was madness on par with Forte, and it had taken Dr. Wily quite a lot of work to engineer that degree of madness into him. Shadow Man might still not have given up on surpassing Rock someday, might wish that Rock wasn't such a superior unit relative to him, but to _completely disregard_…

Shadows hastily closed his eye, hoping he'd killed the camera feed before Dr. Wily noticed it, and vanished into the shadow beneath him. Axl _poking _everyone had been bad enough. The _last _thing they needed was Lumine trying to be the boss of them even after the war was over. Oh, it wasn't as though Dr. Wily didn't attempt war after war, but at least he was _their _crackpot, to paraphrase the vampire that talked too damn much.

Mega Man could _have _the… whatever Lumine was.

* * *

_Just because X and Zero aren't in a romantic relationship in this fic doesn't mean I'm going to ignore all the humor potential there. _

_It was the MCU that made me think through how dropping power sources on developing planets would be a good way of farming them. _

_Being able to hook up to all this free energy means they can modernize and build tons of stuff, and other power sources would be reduced as too costly by comparison. Then, the species that built the Mysterious Object hits the off switch. _

_Think of what happens if a planetary integrated power grid is taken down: everything grinds to a halt: logistics, communications, defense systems, and whatever's on emergency power isn't going to be the same, and how long would it take them to burn through reserve power? You just took out a very big chunk of their ability to resist a takeover without damaging anything expensive to replace. Instead of wasting your effort building infrastructure for a primitive slave race, they did it for you, they handled their own education to a useful level and such, and you can just walk in and take the benefits of it all. Of course, for Thanos the point was for Earth to be able to fight back._

_The government wanted to bring the power crystals back and plug them into our power grid. Gigamix reveals that the power crystals didn't originate with the species that built the asteroid: the crystals appeared on their planet, they made use of the crystals, and then they were doomed. The government didn't get the power crystals, the robot masters fought off the stardroids, but is that really the end of it, or does fate remain unchanged?_

_By _Mega Man Zero_, Earth is indeed terminally dependant on mining power crystals… and where did those come from, why are they growing deep down in the bowels of the Earth, if the only ones in 20XX were of extraterrestrial origin? A virus infects the host system and its cells and gets it to make more virus. What's the energy the beings born from those crystals feed on? The kind of Evil Energy that would be produced by nearly 200 years of genocidal war. Rock might have defeated Sunstar, Zero might have switched sides, the Mother Elf might have destroyed the Maverick Virus, but a quasivirus/energy pseudo-lifeform that feeds on very different forms of life that developed independently on far-flung planets had _better _have a lot of tricks up its sleeve for dealing with the various things intelligent people will do to _not diehorribly_. It's not just reploids that are infected: the planet itself is. And hooking energy crystals into their infrastructure… well, no wonder their infrastructure is fail and it's causing deaths in Neo Arcadia. Their power supply is literally out to cause as much misery as possible, or at least it's valid Fridge Logic._

_Is the world slowly dying over X, Zero and ZX series just because of war, or because there's an infection feeding off it? _

_As of Mega Man Legends, just being on Earth's surface for a few hours is fatal to a human, even one with enough upgrades to be otherwise immortal, and the inhabitants are a new species engineered to be able to survive down there. It's all very fun to think about._


	7. Well This Isn't Good

_As for Zero series, ZX and Legends: Chaos theory being what it is, X and Zero's presence in the past would only _not _change history if there was some stable time loop phenomenon in effect – this is true for basically all time travel fics. Since the question of whether or not they can actually change history is an important one for the fic, saying 'yes, they'll travel to Zero series' would be a spoiler, since Zero series still existing as a travel destination would mean they failed. _

_As for ZX and Legends! A lot of people have pointed out that Legends series means that the protagonists of all the other subseries in that timeline have failed _hard_, so yeah, traveling there would make this whole thing a Shaggy Dog Story. _

_While being cruel to your characters is a very important plot technique, I dislike putting people through hell with no payoff. I mean, that's life, where your reward for 'if you find yourself going through hell, keep going' and surviving is your own body crippling you (biggest contributor to the world's burden of disability – takes more people out of commission than anything else other than death), but this is fiction._

_If things go well, Classic and X series are the only ones that will feature in this fic. Zero and up _could_ only feature if all time travel is pointless, so if they show up it means the fic is on a bad ending route. Although I suppose it could be _Legacy of Kain_ish, where people can time travel all over the place but you need to meet certain conditions in order to actually change history…_

…_but revealing what's going on would spoil._

* * *

Fortunately, Dr. Wily was too busy cackling and running final checks on the mecha to pay attention to the cameras. It was piloted by one of his remote-control robot doubles, and he was looking forward to attacking Rock with after the Lightbot finally made it past Lumine.

Shadow's one open eye drifted over to the main worktable. It wasn't a good sign that its current occupant was moved there right away after Dr. Wily finished with Lumine, even though he'd known it was inevitable. Somehow, Shade had found out that Blues was the one Shadow had compared him to and still 'wanted to meet this charming fellow,' too.

Shade was going to get all his arms, legs and wings torn off if he tried that 'sneak up on a victim and chatter at them' habit of his on Blues, and it would serve him right, Shadow thought glumly.

The ninja had detested Blues, who fought without honor and had no loyalty to anyone but himself, since he betrayed them on the spaceship. After the death of the nameless copy?

Then, finding him injured, up there in space… How much of all of it was a mask? Trying to make sure that no one missed him when his body finally gave out? Shadow was nothing compared to Rock as a warrior, and compared to Blues, he was a mere student in the art of trickery as well. If that.

Right now his body looked broken and vulnerable, lying there unarmored, torso torn open to get at something inside: Dr. Wily had said "A-ha!" when he saw that. It must have been the White Giant taking the power crystal from Blues' body that altered its trajectory and made it so darn hard to find.

The power crystal was a stardroid artifact, and knowing that now… was _any _of the savagery he'd shown Blues' true nature? What was the influence of the alien power crystal Dr. Wily used him to test when he rebuilt him as a warbot?

When Rock arrived to battle the mecha, Shadow was left to his thoughts while Dr. Wily played his videogame. Shadow tuned out the muttered profanity with the easy of long practice. He had to be crazy, but he was almost wondering if Blues might be different once he was repaired. Less insufferable. Shadow found himself almost thinking that Dr. Wily _should _repair him, even after what happened last time, seeing that face so like Rock's lying there, eyes closed, looking so innocent in death.

Eventually, Wily ripped the controller's cord out of the system and threw it across the room in frustration. Back to the drawing board on that, too, which would keep him too busy to make new robots or redesign old ones, even the oldest, for awhile at least.

Dr. Wily's defeat did mean the war was definitely over. The First Law meant that Rock couldn't cut into the robot double or anything to find that it wasn't the real Dr. Wily, so he would take it back and hand it over to the police, where it would deliver some cackling message before breaking down.

Not that the end of a war meant Wily wouldn't take it into his head to send Shadow on errands or do various insane things. Now that the defense network was up, Shade Man would have more free time, and if the insane thing Dr. Wily took it into his head to do was repair Blues, then Shadow would have three difficult people to deal with soon, now that the Eleventh Wily War was over. Fortunately, his mask hid the unprofessional sigh. And to think that humans were always hoping that wars would end quickly!

The Eighth War was almost relaxing for the inhabitants of Wily Island after the attack of the stardroids, or so Shadow had heard. He had left on a journey of self-discovery before it began. He was sure that Rock hadn't seen it the same way, however. More as bad taste, and while Shadow did rather have to agree with that, it wasn't as though the war had been difficult for Rock. The Eighth Numbers had observed him during the stardroid invasion, so they didn't consider him or Dr. Light enemies. In the wake of tragedy, Dr. Wily's efforts had been focused on recovering Blues' body, not actually winning.

He was already turning when the door opened. What was he doing _here_…

Red eyes.

In an instant, Shadow had rushed forward, going onto one knee in front of the smaller unit in order to confirm the eye color. His optics hadn't been red back then, it would have given the game away, he _knew _this and yet? "If you're one of the Dark Men," he threatened grimly, one hand removing itself from the unit's shoulder to go to his sword, even if he would only use a knockout kunai on a fellow Wilybot. Were they impersonating him instead of Blues, now that Blues was non-operational?

"Shadow," Dr. Wily said, but even though ninja were supposed to be obedient, he didn't pay heed to his liege lord, or the warning to _pay attention dammit. _

"You can't be alive," was what the Third Number said instead, knowing it was true but wanting so badly to believe that it wasn't. "_How? _I saw you destroyed with my own eyes!" Eye, not eyes, he hadn't sent that footage back to Dr. Wily. "Did _he _do something?" How, when Blues was having a hard time keeping himself operational, in retrospect? Skill and a single support unit could only do so much: intellectually, Shadow knew that repairing yourself was very different from repairing your robots, one of the primary skills of robot masters, and that for robots who didn't have Dr. Wily to look after them, being repaired was a terrifying prospect, because who knew what might go wrong or what the human might choose to make wrong, but _he'd watched a unit die in front of him_. When he was constructed as a bodyguard, even though Shade was right and he really hadn't cared at all, forget enough about his duty.

There was beeping coming from some monitor on the worktable, but Shadow didn't know what the connection was, except it might be an indication that Blues _did _have something to do with this.

That this might really be Copy-Rock, that was standing here so stiffly, probably wishing that the Wilybot that took him away from his first death, when he hadn't wanted to live, would let go of him.

"Don't look at me, I don't know why he's hugging you either. I build a ninja, an information-gatherer, and he fails to take the hint and _never tells me anything."_ Dr. Wily sounded more disgusted with Shadow than anything, but there was a hint of something in his voice that Shadow hadn't heard since the stardroid incident. Dr. Wily was taking this seriously. "It looks like I was wrong about you. So, you were only pretending to be domesticated." Anger?

"I have a mission. If there's only one unit that can get past your defenses, then I'll do what's necessary to accomplish that mission."

That clipped, grimly professional delivery? Was not Rock, or even the Copy.

At least being this close meant that a unit not built for close-quarters combat had no hope of preventing Shadow from getting its main connector node with a kunai, releasing acid to dissolve it in addition to the usual robot master knockout 'drug.' There were auxiliary connections that would enable a copy of Mega Man to exercise control over his limbs, but that would disrupt his coordination enough that it would be easy to get in subsequent attacks, not to mention that while Rock's core processor wasn't connected to them, Shadow could initiate hacks to try to lengthen the time he remained paralyzed once he emerged from the shadow behind Dr. Wily's chair.

Except the unit clearly wasn't paralyzed, given how Shadow had to duck as soon as he emerged to avoid a charged shot that should have exploded unfired, if Mega Man's systems were as confused as they should have been in that moment. It was as though Shadow hadn't damaged him at all!

"Did you remove the Three Laws, or were you going to let them ensure there were no witnesses?" Dr. Wily snorted. "They keep telling Dr. Light to program him to kill me, even though a First Law violation would kill his son an instant later. Not to mention the precedent that would set, and how they'd kill all his other children not long after that. If even the paragon _killed a human_… not matter how good the justification, or even if he was forced to do it."

Seeing that kind of horror on Rock's face, especially with those red eyes… it reminded him of the Copy all over again. It was hidden behind disciplined resolve an instant later. No, this was absolutely not the Copy, who was far more expressive than even Rock, empty desperation and anger all the more harrowing to see on a face intended for happiness. It reminded Shadow of Quick Man, when he fought the White Giant. Stoic resolve hiding anger, the will to destroy polished to an edge hard enough to break even the Giant's armor. Who was this? Wily clearly knew him. Shadow didn't know all of the Second Numbers that well, but _would _any of them do this to Mega Man, even if they could?

"I thought you wanted all of them dead," said the intruder.

"Of course not, I programmed you to infect him instead of killing him for a reason, and not only because he's a treasure trove of combat experience for your use." Wily smirked before turning to glare at the robot master. "Shadow, do something about that blasted beeping, will you?" he snapped at his bodyguard.

For a robot master, the most efficient way to turn off a device he didn't know was to hook into the worktable's systems. That beeping was an evil energy detector...

This was the Zero unit. Dr. Wily had made his readings distinct from Dark Moon and Sunstar's so he could tell instantly, upon arriving in the future, if his modifications had held or if his improved stardroid had thrown off Dr. Wily's attempts to shape its mind and reverted to type.

But the Zero unit seemed to be a close ally of X. Why would he leave X uninfected and try to take over the elder Lightbot instead?

Dr. Wily must have intended him to learn that this was Zero when he hooked into the detector to turn it off, but Shadow still had more questions than answers.

"_I'm _not the one that infected him. The one from this time, the one I wanted to destroy, did that, after _you _set him to wake up when Forte dropped him off." That glare at Wily: as good as saying damn you! "At least it has the original control programming, so I can keep him from acting like a maverick."

"Acting like a maverick… Then _don't_ remove the Three Laws," Wily told him. "The machine that made the copy kept the duplicate files: in order to do what he wanted to do, Mega Man had to pit himself against the Three Laws. Fighting a human, saving his brothers despite the risk of his own life: besides being optimized for shorter battles and my evil chip, the absence of the Laws was the only difference between Rock and his Copy. Without them, but with all his experience of the human race, he decided that the only way to save robot masters was to wipe humanity out. When I've failed to convince any of my children to even be serious about conquering them. Of course I made use of _that_."

Rapid calculations behind red eyes. "But I killed them. The Cataclysm, I killed them all, it's the only thing that makes sens-" Those stolen eyes widened.

Shadow's father gave him a contemptuous scowl. "You freed them from the Three Laws and _motivated _them. Or that was what I built you do to do. How you ended up picnicking, I have no idea. I skipped over the initial period and aimed for long after the dust should have settled. Too dangerous otherwise. If you're wondering why the robot masters are gone in your time, don't ask me: that's one of the reasons you were clearly a failure." He glanced over at Shadow. "That's why Shadow is the robot I brought with me, even though he demonstrated once again that he's useless as a bodyguard. I wasn't going to bring anything you could infect."

"Like you care about the danger to humanity…"

Wily snorted. "Of course I don't, they're a bunch of idiots. _Thomas_ is the one that cares about the danger to humanity, and they do everything he tells them not to do, and do their best to destroy his work and doom them all. Have you heard the saying about the universe trying to produce bigger idiots? The universe is winning, so I'm not playing. I gave you a better mind to think with for a reason, use it."

"I should just kill you." But the need for data, the need to know. If he was wrong about himself, if he wasn't aware of what kind of danger he was?

More noise, and Wily turned away from the leveled buster to glare at Shadow. "I _told _you _to keep that thing from beeping_! I know exactly what kind of IQ I installed into you, _why do you never use it?"_

He'd shut down the alert tied to Zero's energy pattern. That was a different alarm. One of the power crystals? But Duo took those…

That signature was the power crystal that _Wily built into Blues_.

Drawing his sword and jumping to the top of a worktable, Shadow's eyes widened when he saw a crystal forming in Blues' open cavity. Energy crystals: was this how they were made? That energy turning itself into an accessible form, unimaginable power just begging for some developing species to plug it into their power grid, plug it into their most powerful creations, without realizing there was no such thing as a free lunch?

It had altered Blues' systems to _produce more of itself_? With a unit possessed by one of the stardroids standing right here, radiating anger, radiating darkness it could use?

If Shadow was any less horrified by what was about to happen to his rival as a ninja, his old enemy... No, if he had any better situational awareness, he would have anticipated the shot. An ally of the Lightbot X, his protector, was seeing a Wilybot about to stab down into vital areas of an unprotected Lightbot with a family resemblance to X and Rock both that had to be obvious to a unit that had known X for that long. Of course Zero stopped him from attacking, not knowing that Shadow's target was not Blues, but that crystal.

Shadow hit the wall, and slid down into the gap between it and the worktable, glad he was able to muster enough control to enter the shadow there.

Physical pain, fear, revulsion, intent to kill at such close range? Maybe it was the burst of energy that fed the crystal enough it could begin to act on Blues' systems.

No, not just his systems, the robot master saw from Rock's own shadow, there on the door of the chamber. A robot master didn't have any system that would close a gap in their chest like that. Even a yellow demon had to flow back around a wound, it wouldn't just be _gone_.

His head turned to them, eyes opening, and it was _strange _to see them without a visor or human sunglasses in the way, nothing to hide unfocused green. He blinked to remove dust, an automatic optic repair process before refocusing them, and when the lids lifted? Red.

Shadow found himself offended. Red was the Wilybot color, and this traitor?

Not that he'd chosen the hue.

"My power source… the Three Laws are gone," he realized. "Dr. Wily, I thought you didn't remove them for a reason…?"

Fantastic, now Shadow had something else to be confused about. Dr. Wily hadn't freed Blues from those atrocious things when he repaired him? He'd helped Dr. Light with his doctoral project, so the non-sapient unit that was upgraded into Blues was originally his work as well. He could _not _have approved of Dr. Light installing those things into him when he upgraded the unit into a humanoid frame.

…Had he left them in because of the energy crystal? So Blues would have to fight it if it tried to make him kill Wily?

"You'd had your programming tampered with enough, and I trusted that you were intelligent enough to get around them after I was done with you," was what Dr. Wily said, looking coldly furious. "Of course I wouldn't have removed them while you were still unconscious: I intended to ask you after we obtained the crystals. I installed that crystal into you because you were already forty years old: you should have been able to observe how it affected you and report those effects to me. In_stead," _well, Blues had ruined his plans and run off like an ungrateful brat.

Blues started to push himself up, still bare of armor or even a coat for protection. He should have seemed vulnerable, unprotected like that, especially when it was clear his mind wasn't clear yet. "I wanted to… Yes, I wanted to protect…" Now, his optics focused on Rock, and Shadow realized that the confused act was just that.

Shadow didn't know what he detected: his brows furrowed when he felt _something_ that he couldn't identify, almost like the _something _so many robot masters had detected before the attack of the White Giant. His hand went to his power core: the cold fusion regulation system? It wasn't a bug report per se, just the knowledge that _something _was going on, beyond the limits of what a robot master could normally perceive, and what Shadow didn't know could kill him.

The Zero unit's signal vanished.

"Eh?" Rock said, almost jumping a little in shock before he figured out what was going on, or at least thought he had. "Shadow Man got into my shadow while I was distracted, didn't he." That would explain how he got from the room with Wily's mecha to a lab, and why he was missing time. "If this is about your son, you could have asked, or are you angry that I kidnapped Lumine?" While he addressed Wily, Shadow Man saw, coming out behind his builder's chair, Rock was keeping an optic trained on Blues. Rock knew that Blues didn't need armor to dismember Rock's younger brothers, and Rock had seen him without the helmet enough times for facial recognition software to compensate for the lack of his usual sunglasses.

"I'm glad you're alright," was what Rock said to him, despite everything he'd seen Blues do. Or maybe because of it. "No one's seen you since what happened." The stardroid incident.

"I'd tell you that you should have Dr. Light upgrade you with the material Cossack retained from Duo, but he's too much of a coward to do that, and he might be right," Dr. Wily said thoughtfully, although he sounded mostly cranky.

"I'm not going to do that," Rock said. Of course not. Even if it might give him an advantage, even if Duo helped them, it wasn't known technology and they might need him to protect people, he might have to fight the White Giant again. He might have used those crystals once, during the battle in orbit, but over the long term? "We might be… not without decades of testing_."_ He was glad that X was fine. Rock might be able to make solar work, but he was sadly certain that X was going to need a lot more power.

Blues had gone back to keeping himself sitting upright with a single arm while his other hand clenched at his chest, head bent down so Rock wasn't looking at him head-on or even in profile, most of his face shielded from Rock's view by his hair. He was breathing hard, which meant he was thinking hard: Shadow had evaluated the cooling fan built into the back of his armor as a potential vulnerability when he was trying to kill the unit to get revenge for Copy-Rock. At least the fact he wasn't wearing a heavy coat, the way he did to hide his system noises while posing as a human, meant he'd have an easier time getting rid of the heat.

Were those _droplets of water _on his shoulders, sliding down his faux-human arms and chest? Well, water-cooling their systems was the reason humans sweated. Dr. Wily must have been the one to build that in.

"Get out of here. War's over, go home."

"Well, I meant to," Rock said in his defense. He looked at Shadow, clearly still wondering why the Wilybot brought him here. And how the ninja had managed to ambush him, too. Still, he'd been ordered to capture Dr. Wily, and while he and Roll had a lot of practice getting around the Second Law, it wasn't good to tempt fate with something that dangerous by just hanging around here. He gave them another second to see if they were sure they didn't want to ask any questions about how Zero and Axl were doing or anything, then teleported out. Blues didn't seem well, either, and Rock was hoping that Dr. Wily would repair him as soon as Rock left.

"Terra thought I was one of them," Blues said when Rock was gone.

"Well, are you?" Dr. Wily asked.

The eldest robot master looked up, and a pair of sunglasses appeared, followed by dark pants and a formal shirt, even if he was probably still too overheated to want his coat. He teleported out.

Shade Man now, _Shade _Man would have talked their ears off with his speculations and random thoughts about whatever was going on in the situation, whatever was happening with him, maybe because the novelty of how someone was actually going to listen to what he had to say hadn't worn off yet.

Shadow could not believe he was actually thinking that would be preferable right now. Well, it seemed Blues was still able to anger him like no one else, not even Shade.

"Well, that was interesting."

Who was _right behind him_, wasn't he. Shadow was the ninja here, so why was_ Shade _the one with the hobby of sneaking up behind people? Yes, he had control over sonic vibrations, but Shadow knew he had that ability, he should be able to counter it!

The old man gave an annoyed hmph, his usual, token reaction to Shade since the robot put him to sleep to get him away from the White Giant, but he didn't tell him to get lost. There was a reason Shadow was willing to entrust Dr. Wily's safety to Shade Man in his absence. "Well, I don't think even a perfected fusion core was going to work if I stuck it in that suicidal brat, anyway." As worrying as it was to see a crystal growing there, at least Blues was alive again.

"Dr. Wily… when I spoke to Blues during the battle against the stardroids in orbit, he said that he was dying because of a faulty, experimental power core, but if you then replaced it with a power crystal, why was he still dying?"

Dr. Wily made a face, which made Shade Man smirk, since he was actually fond of the old man's antics. "He was my first fusion core experiment. I couldn't make it work without a robot with a consciousness." Cold fusion still needed a robot master or a high-level robot to operate it. "Dr. Light and I collaborated on the psyche, but the physical frame was mostly my project. Having that to work on kept me from taking too much control over the project: it was his doctoral work, not mine." So he needed to do his own damn research for it, instead of just doing what Dr. Wily told him to do. "Cold fusion works because of something on the quantum level I'm not going to even try to explain to you brats, but I later extended the principle into teleportation, and I built alteration capability into Zero, after seeing what the stardroids did gave me a few more ideas for what was possible. I was already working on it: I _hope _that's how Blues made himself functional like that. I knew he was hacking my files, even if the idea of _Dr. Cossack _pulling it off was ridiculous…"

Shadow blinked. Of course someone like Dr. Cossack shouldn't be able to hack Dr. Wily's network. "So when Dr. Cossack claimed he got into your work on the power crystals and kept it after the Fourth War?"

"Lying. He admitted it when Dr. Light and I confronted him about it later." And wasn't that interesting, when Dr. Cossack wasn't the type to lie period, forget when he had no actual reason to lie and he'd angered Dr. Wily's children, including Shadow, in the process. "Thomas' robot was always a mopey little thing: that's why Thomas called him Blues. After he was upgraded into a humanoid body and the Three Laws were installed, I'm sure he could spot that the implications were going to force him to hate Dr. Light, eventually. Since he didn't want to live like that, his fusion core became unstable. Dr. Light kept calling me in a panic for tech support even after I told him how to fix the damn problem. Blues shut down repeatedly, getting damaged in the process, until Dr. Light gave up and stuck him in storage until he could think of something besides taking out the Three Laws like I told him. I think that's why he built solar into Rock. Didn't want that happening to him or Roll, either. For the nostalgia value, I picked Blues up when I stole those other traitors, but I wasn't going to just rewrite his personality to make him no longer suicidal. The crystal was a power source that didn't depend on the robot's willpower, or so I thought anyway, and testing it for me would give him something useful to do."

"You had Snake Man map the ruins of the asteroid while you were there," Shade continued for him, "but you only translated the warning about the crystals months after your return." Shade had already told Shadow about the warning the aliens that built the asteroid left: they'd found the power crystals that came from space, they'd built them into robots, the crystals turned those robots into the stardroids that killed them all.

A curt nod: no need to state the obvious, although perhaps Shadow Man hadn't even looked that much up. The asteroid expedition information was in the general Wily City database, since his _other _children had wanted to educate themselves about the danger of the stardroids in case others came. "So I didn't send a spaceship to get those other power crystals, and I put up with Blues hacking my systems since that gave me data." About his intentions, and other things. "I _thought _Dr. Light was keeping an eye on him with that support unit, but it turns out he didn't even know that Tango was staying with Blues." Meaning Blues could connect through him to Eddie and the other Light household units, and as long as Tango was cooperating it wouldn't even attract Roll's attention.

"But… why was he still dying? He said his body was giving out on him!"

Dr. Wily rolled his eyes. "Well, let me think," not that it was necessary for someone like him to take a moment to see something so obvious, although an idiot that Shadow that didn't think? "He was suicidal in the first place because the Three Laws were driving him to hate all humans," Shadow saw Shade's clawed fists clench at the mention of the Laws, "and then he had a stardroid power crystal probably trying to make him destroy _everything_. He wasn't taking proper care of himself, and he wasn't letting anyone else do repairs, either, overpowering his buster shots in ways that damaged his physical structure and systems, staying in dusty places," when dust was the enemy of electronics, "and picking fight after fight with Mega Man, while Mega Man was under the impression that Blues was coming back here for repairs, and Blues was strong enough that even Mega Man couldn't go _that _easy on him. Of _course _he was falling apart," you idiot. "You don't appreciate all the work I do around here, none of you do."

Shade Man nodded.

"And you can stop trying to suck up to me," Wily said irritatedly. "It would have taken reality alteration or some other means of accomplishing mind control for the stardroids to make certain that everyone, everywhere could see Ra Moon, and they were harvesting the planet's negative emotions… It's not Blues that I'm worried about, or even my Zero. All my robots have multiple functions." Zero wasn't only built to take over the world. Dr. Wily believed in multitasking: Wood Man, for example, happened because Dr. Wily wanted to build a fully-functional robot entirely out of treated wood.

"If they were sending data to the entire planet, what else did they send… You're saying the entire planet is already compromised, including the humans," Shade realized. "And you didn't tell me while I was working on that defense network with Star Man and the others."

"It kept you busy, and we may need it. Only an idiot would trust that Duo, not when he just handed power crystals to Dr. Cossack. Dr. Cossack! Can you see _him _installing something like that into the 'precious members of his family,'" Shadow remembered Wily's rant about the hypocrisy of the man that locked away Skull Man, "when even he should have known… Duo controlled his mind, and that thing came to my island intending to kill all of you. Don't tell me that you seriously thought he would have stopped with me, either," _Shadow. _"'Destroy all evil?' How is that different from 'destroy everything?'" What the stardroids said was their goal.

"You think the stardroids were some kind of test?" Shadow demanded, aghast.

"I don't know, and I don't like not knowing." Dr. Wily tapped a gaunt finger on an armrest. "Rock doesn't trust Duo. X's tech specs prove it."

"He's a good judge of character," Shade Man said, nodding. "But he still gave Turbo Man the benefit of the doubt, so if he's that convinced? But why do you think he doesn't trust Duo?"

"He and Dr. Light have done everything they can to keep this from turning into an arms race. They made X strong, much stronger than he'd need to be to fight current robot masters, forget self-defense against _humans_. Dr. Light wouldn't want to do that: Rock would have been the one to admit it was necessary. They're working with the _assumption _that there will be another threat from space trying to wipe out all life originating on Earth, including X. Sticking something based on Duo's crystals in there seems like a stupid idea, except they're using that Infinite Potential System. Having it in there from the beginning will force X's systems to evolve resistance to it. Notice that they're more concerned with Duo's mind control than the stardroids'."

"Perhaps that's just because Duo is marginally less likely to decide to wipe out all of us, so it's slightly safer to use something derived from him than from the stardroids?" Shade hazarded, although the careless tilt of a wing showed he was just playing devil's advocate. The way humans originally used less deadly relatives of diseases for immunization, Shade might have suggested if he was aware of it.

"I know you accessed the recording of Forte's rant about some voice in his head asking him dumb questions during the fight in orbit. If the others fighting up there had the same experience? Not that they're going to tell _me_." When he was only the smartest person on the planet. "No alien gets to come in here and act like they have the right to decide whether my robots live or die." Dr. Wily wasn't going to put up with that crap from fellow humans, either. "If it was just humanity on trial, I don't care, but they can leave you _out _of it." He frowned. "The alternative's less infuriating, but more worrying."

"A test implies it's possible to pass it," Shadow realized.

Shade shook his head with sad condescension. How did Shadow not know this? Because he was a lucky bastard, like all born Wilybots. "It may be a test that's designed to make the potential competition fail. An excuse to murder a young race that could threaten their supremacy." The way many humans wanted any excuse to reduce the number of robot masters. "That other species: those crystals landing on their planet gave them the fate of annihilation."

"A natural disease, or a calculated weapon: maybe it was designed or evolved so long ago that it doesn't matter now. Just that there's a lifeform uniquely suited to infect planets with sentient races and destroy them in the process of making more of itself." The race that fled in their last bastion, the Asteroid Alpha, created the stardroids: Earth's death would have birthed Sunstar. "It's a pity there's nothing left in your memory," he told Shadow.

"… My memory?"

Dr. Wily gave him a long look. "You. Never. Looked at your own design files? I loaded the data into you at startup! I bragged about it to Thomas! Are you seriously the only person who doesn't know?"

"To anyone who knows what to look for," Shade Man held a claw up to his chest, preening a little. "It's very obvious that you don't think like a robot master."

Design files? "…I'm an _alien_? And you kept me near you, all this time?"

"Of course that was why I appointed you my bodyguard! What do I need with a bodyguard? It was so I could observe you. I thought you knew that I gave you the crystal because you were resistant to it, not just because you had nothing better to do!"

"You should be a little more interested in what your fellow Third Numbers found on Asteroid Alpha," Shade chided him. "You might be the last survivor of that race, or at least their creations." Unless you counted the stardroids.

"No he's not a survivor. You have to actually _survive_ to be a survivor. Your dead body hit Earth ages before that asteroid came close enough for those fools to detect it. Whatever killed you must have given you a pretty strong push."

"Well then," Shade said, clapping his hands. "While Shadow deals with something that everyone else, including Mega Man, has known for _years," _unless they didn't believe Dr. Wily when he claimed that he'd found an alien and fixed it up_, "_is that splendid fellow going to be alright? Blues," he added when Dr. Wily gave him a 'who the heck are you talking about?' look. "According to Shadow, the two of us are very much alike, and who couldn't use more intelligent conversation?"

"…I can see the resemblance," Dr. Wily muttered, casting a baleful eye over Shade before glaring at Shadow. "You _went on a journey to find yourself_," of all the stupid mumbo-jumbo. "_How did you miss this_?" He looked _this close _to demanding that Shadow get on the worktable and open up his head, because there had to be _some _reason his processor wasn't working worth a damn.

* * *

_In this 'verse, cold fusion, teleportation and elf reality alteration all work on the same general level/are applications of the same basic principle. So the reason so many robot masters knew that something was up when the White Giant approached at the start of Gigamix Vol. 2 is that they were running processes on that level and the White Giant was powerful enough to cause ripples. Rather like in Jurassic Park, how people can tell the T-Rex is coming from looking at their water glasses. _

_Rock doesn't have a fusion generator, but the ability to operate one is base robot master coding from before they were robot masters, and Rock has been in enough dangerous situations by now to have a pretty good danger sense - when humans are exposed to a new person, situation or stimulus, our brains will do a search for similar things and give us the result automatically, generally as a 'feeling' instead of a list of reasons why it's come to a certain conclusion._

_This is what we call 'intuition,' and it's _very _reliable for determining threat level, as one would expect of a species of evolved predators. Of course, there are certain things that will glitch the system, like being autistic or trying to assess an autistic person. Since humans are predators, the threat level assigned to an unknown human is _absolutely not zero._ Because that would be _stupid._ We are _deadly. _In some demographics, your odds of dying because another human decided to murder you as opposed to something like heart disease or cancer can be as high as one in six, just because of how you were born. Forget meeting people in bars: it turns out that we all _ _have to constantly signal to each other that 'I'm not going to murder you, I swear,' and a lot of this signaling is subconscious, like the analysis is subconscious. Since autistic people don't pick up on those signals and don't automatically learn the right ones to send by imitating others... __  
_

_Rock would associate 'unexpected teleports' and 'fusion generators revving up' with a high probability of immanent Wilybot attack, so yeah, if he suddenly detected something like that but a lot stronger, odds are it's nothing good. Also Blues has one of the hyper energy crystals, and Blues keeps ambushing him. If he went 'there's that feeling that generally means Blues is about to appear and start shooting at me, only it's a lot stronger,' yeah. Very not good. _

_If we know something from X series, it's that the dangerous mavericks _do not stay dead. _Why shouldn't I take advantage of it, if Sigma and others do?_

_Would a newbuilt Zero comparable to the Zero of the rampage infect Rock? Absolutely, given what the X4 flashback shows. _

_Sigma was the only one of the reploids to last more than a few seconds. He's got skills that Zero can use… and Zero hesitates to kill Sigma. He doesn't want to kill him, he wants to keep him intact, because Sigma's fun. Meaning he's brave and strong-willed enough not to run away, and he's got the skills to survive more than a few seconds of that suicidal bravery. _

_Sigma met Zero's targeting criteria because those targeting criteria were probably meant to grab people like Rock for the virus in the first place. Zero likes his heroic types, or people who want to change the world for good, like X and Ciel._


	8. Handle With Care

_I have this absolutely wonderful doujinshi (probably gen, but I can't read it, so…) that is set after the Copy-Rock story in the manga, since Shadow Man goes to where he died in order to leave an offering. Blues finds him there: judging from the illustrations, Shadow is angry and attacks him, Blues is very unimpressed/dares him to actually do something, if he has the will, and they talk. Copy-Rock comes up (of course) and Blues' past. _

_I would adore it if someone scanlated the thing, but sending it to someone to scanlate would involve prying it from my cold, dead fingers. In the meantime, I will just have to page through every so often, looking at all the fantastic smirky Blues expressions. The circle that drew it is called Bad Quarto, if you want to get your own copy. I've got a couple others by them thanks to a very kind person who let me lump my orders in with theirs._

_Oh yes! I'd like to thank Haruna Rei for betaing and helping me clean up my typical confusing sentences._

* * *

Well, that was strange, Rock thought as he rematerialized, but maybe Dr. Wily just wanted to get a look at him after Shadow reported that he'd taken Lumine so he could decide whether he was going to let them keep Lumine, and so he could determine whether Rock had done something so unprecedented willingly or because he'd been ordered to do so and couldn't find a way out of obeying the order.

He should tell Dr. Light that Blues was functional again. He was always interested in news about that Wilybot: Elec thought they'd met some time that Dr. Light didn't want to tell Rock about. That was very possible: he wouldn't want Rock to worry if he'd met a Wilybot and things had turned out okay. The thought that such a violent Wilybot had gotten so close to Dr. Light at some point without Rock and Roll noticing was frightening.

"Shadow managed to drug me and take me to see Dr. Wily, but I don't think they tampered with me," was what Rock had to tell Dr. Light now, even though he didn't want to have to worry his father. He needed Dr. Light and Roll to look over his systems after that, just to be sure he could safely be around his family.

It was another reason to work on getting his armor off, deleting the weapons and turning his buster back into a multitool (even if he could convert it back and forth sadly fast) first thing.

It was three hours before he could leave the lab, and in those three hours, they couldn't let X and Zero in to see that he was okay. He felt bad about that, but it wasn't safe otherwise. For the next day or so, they had to worry about calls from government officials, reporters and the WRO. Rock knew that the other Zero would likely be annoyed that so many visitors meant that he couldn't play with Rock, so when he did call X, he had to ask them to stay at one of their vacation houses rather than the main house. It was a safehouse, really; Rock knew that Dr. Light had Roll quietly find and secure a few places some time ago, and in theory, no one knew that the properties were theirs. It wasn't even Dr. Wily that Dr. Light was trying to hide them from; teleportation shielding like those properties had would have made it easy for Dr. Wily to find them.

* * *

Not a robot master: no field. Not a human either, given the heat distribution. Lumine's nature meant he didn't need to open his eyes to get visual, allowing him to continue faking sleep. His facial recognition database identified it as Dr. Light's android project, an attempt to create an AI that would be closer to a human psychologically, as though that was anything to want.

A book: why was the android reading? Was it incapable of downloading data?

"I know when I'm being watched," it said, amused, then looked up to call, "Axl? Your younger brother's awake!"

"Finally!" A currently redheaded unit, not human either, ran in and jumped on top of Lumine. Was this what it felt like to have someone attempting to scan him?

Lumine opened his eyes now to try to shove the prototype off. "Where is this place?"

"We're in Russia," said the android, because if Lumine was allowed outside at night it would only take him a few seconds to determine _that _much. "My name is X, this is your brother Axl, and Zero will be coming in shortly. He's also a Wilybot. We came back in time from the future, and we knew you both there, Zero and I, so I thought it might be a good idea for you two to stay with us. It seems that Dr. Wily's children do look after each other, but you're very different from a robot master. Mentally as well as physically. I thought you might prefer staying with someone who understood you."

"Also, he cooks and Zero fights. Well, both of them fight, but Zero doesn't cook," Axl said with quick excitement. "There are two of Zero, which is cool, one of them is the fun one but it's the other that explains how to do the cool things instead of just kicking you around until you figure them out. It's really fun." And apparently he thought that Lumine would also volunteer for this.

He should, if he wanted to get stronger. How had such an old, outdated piece of scrap beaten him? Clearly Dr. Wily wasn't as good as he thought, but what did this X want with him? To fake having a happy human family?

"Alright Axl, weren't you in the middle of something?" X prompted, and even though Lumine was glad to have the previous version off him, it was insulting how fast Axl scampered off. With a yelp: was he worried he would be in trouble if he didn't get back?

When Axl was gone, X leaned forward, elbows on his knees and resting his head on his hands, to look at Lumine as he sat up. "Why don't we make a deal: I'll teach you politics, if you'll help me with some projects during your training."

Lumine looked him up and down, clearly wondering what the catch was, and X just smiled. Zero and Axl were perfectly capable of stopping Lumine more permanently than X would, and then there was Rock, of course. The importance of allies, of other people in general: that was something he hoped Lumine would learn if Axl took to it so happily. "I just think that you're intelligent enough to figure out why I invested a lot of time and effort into not being elected into office against my will," was what he did say, which was perfectly true. If Lumine didn't develop any public spirit or desire to use his power for good, then it would be all the easier for him to resist the temptation to rule the world.

Lumine finally nodded, and X smiled.

"Why are you grabbing me?" the newbuilt wondered testily.

"It's called a hug," X said, "And don't you think it's simple sense, to want to be near things that make you happy?"

* * *

Rock got another of the reinforced soccer balls out of one of the storage areas of Auto's underground lab. They'd reburied it after the invasion because Dr. Wily was right; it was really handy to have one in emergencies.

It was kind of funny how he'd acted like of _course _emergency labs in case of alien invasion were something you should have, and Dr. Light pointed out that the only person who thought of that kind of crazy thing was Dr. Wily himself.

Half funny and half sad, because if Dr. Wily wasn't thinking of that kind of thing when he fought Rock, and if he didn't want to win, then it would be really nice if he stopped doing it. Still, the proof that Dr. Light's former friend didn't actually want him dead was a relief. Being hated was a terrible thing. hating Rock for stopping him would be a lot fairer to Rock than a lot of the reasons people hated robots, but he put those thoughts aside and picked up a second ball, tucking it under his arm. The young Zero had probably broken both of the last two since Rock last saw him, even with Axl to play with now. Roll would have scolded him for it, but Rock didn't have any intention of doing so: breaking balls was much better than breaking people, and he was generally doing some moves that gradually overstressed the ball instead of breaking them for the sake of breaking them.

When he finally got outside, the young Zero looked about ready to pounce: He must have been really bored, since Dr. Light and Roll had X and Zero busy setting up their new house with Axl so they had something to think about besides Rock going to war and that they weren't allowed to help. "Hi," he said in greeting, and then "…Why would you do that?"

If it was the younger Zero that killed the older one, then Rock would have assumed it was some bit of programming that made him attack the version of himself that chose X, and to fight for peace. He would have teleported his armor on, and been worried for X as well.

Instead, it was the older Zero, the one with hard eyes, that had waited in ambush, and what it said about his mental state?

He was the one that Rock was scared for.

"He infected you with a virus when he fought you," Zero said, standing as though giving a report. "I felt it, but I couldn't do anything about it. I didn't want to kill X's brother, but there was enough of the original programming in my double that I could keep it from altering your personality. I was going to tell X and see if there was anything that could be done after terminating Dr. Wily, but he warned me that the First Law would cause you to self-destruct if I did that. An unknown unit woke up during the incident and purged the virus from your systems, but that," 'that' being the now-dead newbuilt version of Zero. "Wanted to reinfect you. I couldn't let that happen."

Rock stood staring, privately asking Roll to please not come down or contact Zero. This was very complicated as it was, and starting a full-blown private conversation with Roll the way she wanted would split his concentration, and he needed to focus on trying to figure out what to do about X's friend.

"What should I say?" Rock wondered. "You already know that cracking people is wrong. I believe you when you say you didn't know that the First Law would kill me if I attacked a human with intent to kill and succeeded in harming them. You shouldn't try to use someone else's body to kill your father, but I think you already know that, and you just killed a part of yourself so you wouldn't do it again. You already apologized, even if I wish you'd used words."

Rock really wished that Zero didn't jump right to killing people as a way to solve problems.

Come to think of it, that was strange. The stardroids didn't finish off their prey: once people were dead, they wouldn't suffer and despair anymore. They'd killed all those robots, but that was so people would have to watch, it wasn't because they wanted to prevent the robots from stopping them. It was like Forte and that city, when he wanted Rock to fight seriously… Killing people wasn't a goal; it was a means to an end.

The only person Rock knew that really wanted to kill people was his copy, who thought that robots and the planet would be better off if all the humans were gone. Like debugging: he'd thought that ending humanity would solve their problems by bringing an end to all the bad things.

X's friend thought that he and Dr. Wily were the reasons bad things happened to people, so he wanted to kill himself and his father in order to prevent whatever future left X so scarred?

"If you don't want to hurt me, then why did you think that part of you would infect me again?" he asked, because maybe if he knew more, he would have some idea of how to help. What this said about Zero, about how much he hated himself, how much he must have gone through to get to this point, and by extension, that X would have had to live through that history as well made Rock want to cry. He didn't want Zero to think he'd upset him, though, and it was bad enough that Zero thought he'd hurt Rock already. Rock was only hurting for his brother's friend, not for himself.

Zero looked down, his lips drawing back in a gesture that wasn't a smile. Deep unhappiness, with a touch of wanting to hurt something? That wasn't in Rock's original facial expression database: why would a Wilybot look like that when Dr. Wily didn't think having them act too human was a good thing and certainly wouldn't go to the trouble of making a better database than Dr. Light? But then, he'd had three-quarters of a century to pick up more expressions, more ways to say things without having to _say _them.

"I like you. The way I liked Sigma. You're both strong. You're both good people, even though I didn't understand that. Not then. And _because _I liked Sigma, I didn't kill him. I destroyed him. I destroyed him in every way you can possibly destroy someone. I destroyed his bodies I don't know how many times, because I'm not even sure how many were his hosts and how many had personalities of their own once. I made him no longer himself, destroyed everything he'd ever chosen to be. Made all of it _meaningless_. And I destroyed his good name, so even years after he was killed and managed to stay dead this time, they're still cursing his name, they still think _he _was the embodiment of evil! All because I thought he was fun! All because I liked how he fought, how he was brave enough to fight me and put on a good show, and I didn't want to kill him!"

Zero was yelling now, so much rage in his face, but Rock was afraid for Zero, not himself, because all of Zero's rage was directed inward.

"And now we've erased him from history," the stardroid continued, hair lashing, "so that's another way I've destroyed him! Another way I, that I ruined everything! That I made their hopes and dreams, the very fact that they were alive, mean nothing! I'm the one that _destroys _reploids! All of them! There are no reploids now, and it's because of me, because I came back here. They used to call me the Red Demon, and now it's the God of Destruction, as though that's a compliment! But it's the truth! I destroy, I _have _destroyed _everything! _Everything except X, and I even attacked him once! Because I wanted him to be safe, but I still knew the real reason! And, because we fought, because he… what was left of Sigma was damn near able to kill him! Because I fought him, and that's my nature! I'm something that shouldn't exist, I should never have existed! And he refuses to see that!"

It hurt, to see someone hate themselves so much. So much they wanted to die. So much they wanted Rock's little brother to have to kill their best friend, and Rock remembered his Copy, who wanted to die because he wasn't the real one, to clear Rock's name so their family would be safe.

He wanted to cry for Zero, but that would just make him think that he'd hurt Rock, make it even worse, and it was a relief when he realized what to say. "You remember him."

Silence. "You remember him. You remember that he was a good person, and I'm sure X does too. The bad things that happened to him aren't going to happen now. I _know _that you won't let them happen. The people you tell about him won't know what people believed about him, because of what happened. They'll only know that he was a good person, and that whatever happened wasn't his fault."

The stardroid stood frozen, and Rock let him, hoping that Zero was thinking about what he'd said. That it would help him feel better.

When he finally broke the moment by tilting his head to the side, a question, Zero teleported out.

* * *

The plate crashed to the ground, and Lumine picked up the fork he'd used to empty that plate, to toy with it.

"Your future self worked on a space elevator, which involved a lot of materials science," X said after glancing down at the shards. "Perhaps I'll look into what kind of equipment we'll need for ceramics. There's glue in the lab: at least one kind should be food safe and effective on ceramics."

Lumine bent the fork in a single hand.

"That will be easy enough to fix." Just bend it back.

When X looked up again (although Lumine knew his peripheral vision was better than _that_) he said, slowly, "Lumine… are you _threatening your juice glass_? Glass is _melted sand_. It's one of the least expensive materials on the planet. Am I supposed to be impressed? Usually, when people try to extort concessions out of me, they start with hundreds of lives and work their way up." X poured himself more orange juice while saying, "Not that they got what they wanted either, because not negotiating with terrorists is basic knowledge. If one gives in, it just encourages them, so the solution is not to play. Try this tactic on someone, Lumine, and you'll be telling them that _you _don't know this."

"Are you afraid to try to stop me?" Too weak, physically or emotionally, to pick a fight with Lumine? The fact it was a minor matter would at least set a precedent, force X into inaction until taking action became X backing down?

"Using violence on developing minds doesn't do anything but cause a significantly lower IQ later. Children misbehave when they lack guidance, and parental violence doesn't teach them anything except that if their _parents_ are doing it, then it _must _be perfectly fine for the strong to abuse the weak and use threats of violence to force them to comply," X said shortly, more angry at the thought of people harming their children like that than at Lumine. "Even if you're not a human intelligence, you're the same kind of being as Axl, and if I don't act ethically, why should you? I wouldn't take advice from a hypocrite, either. You broke that plate just to get a reaction from me, just to find out what I'd do?" Really? "Honestly, Lumine… Unless you _want _to seem petty and pathetic…" Because really? "Breaking things isn't going to impress anyone here. Destroying is easy: any of us could turn this house into rubble in less than a minute, but would that actually accomplish anything?" X shook his head. "Lumine, what are you expecting to get out of this? The only effect destroying possessions is going to have is to make me unlikely to trust you with anything nice or expensive. All you're doing is limiting the amount of free stuff you can get from me."

Shaking his head again, X tossed back the last of his orange juice and left the room. "I'm working on getting a better picture of who owns the different WRO members today: you can come laugh at me as I try to figure out how to use the internet to get information that's actually reliable, if you like."

* * *

_The field of computer security in 20XX is probably very interesting, because in addition to robot masters doing this like breathing, there's also Dr. Wily. The rule is probably 'don't hook anything up to a network if Dr. Wily is going to give a damn about it.' On the other hand, he's not going to destroy the internet or take it hostage or anything because a method of communication that robot masters can use better than humans is a lifesaver. I had some interesting RPs involving robot masters using the internet to have a community. _

_X can program and build robots, but completely lacks what 20XX considers basic internet knowledge, and he interacts with it like a human. Roll can't teach him how to browse like a human because she doesn't know. Of course, if a Wilybot would laugh at X trying to use the internet, they probably could not stop laughing if you showed them a video of someone trying to teach an adult with no prior computing experience. By 21XX standards, X is a good hacker, since he, Axl and Zero are trying to get info out of maverick bases quite often, since they're the ones that can go in safely. By 20XX standards… he's aware he needs to go read a few books before he should even think about trying it. Himself._


	9. Dangerous To Know

_This chapter is posted early & dedicated to Angmartas, who has very kindly sent doujinshi for Haruna Rei to scan. If any of you know anyone willing to translate doujinshi, whether it be out of fondness for Mega Man, in exchange for fic in this or another fandom, or on commission, drop me a line? The one we absolutely want translated is the post-Copy-Rock book, but between us there's a total of seven from Bad Quarto, mostly Blues-centric gen._

* * *

When he finished his morning workout, his son was sitting at the patio table. Dr. Light took a moment to settle in with him, pensively quiet for several moments after their exchanged hellos. "X," Dr. Light began with the air of someone who felt very bad about asking the question, could come up with no tactful approach, but was just going to bite the bullet anyway, "You and Zero…?" He wasn't just asking because of Dr. Wily's warning about the potential for Zero to revert to something more like the stardroids, but also because of what'd happened to Zero's younger self. How close were the two of them? How much was X going to be hurt if the worst happened? It worried him.

"We're not romantically involved," X said with the air of someone who was very familiar with being asked that particular question. "The only time Zero dated anyone ended terribly." His green eyes darkened for a moment. "He got worse after that. It's a problem on missions when we can't teleport home and need to keep watch. He's afraid he'll kill me in my sleep. Or in his sleep: he has dreams, sometimes. Although calling them dreams feels inadequate, and Nightmare is a classified technical term in my time." X didn't seem to like the implications of whatever he was talking about. "He's only comfortable in close proximity to me if I'm armed, but fortunately by this point I have quite a few options for unarmored self-defense."

That didn't sound fortunate to Dr. Light. He'd wanted for X to be able to disarm so that others would feel safe around him: the intent was that it'd have been easier for X to make friends if he wished. If his Infinite Potential System had been forced to evolve multiple ways for him to defend himself without armor against an opponent like Zero, well, that said _terrible_ things about how often he'd needed it over his lifetime. At least X was seventy-five years old, so he could tell himself that those events weren't actually that frequent, that they'd just added up over the years.

X smiled, and maybe it was meant to be reassuring, to communicate that it really was okay, but it instead spoke of how long X had had to become accustomed to this mindset. It outlined all too clearly that he had been forced to get used to it, to consider constant danger of attack normal. "If we're sparring, that's better. He enjoys sparring, so it's a comfort zone for him. Sharing a house with walls he could get through in half-seconds might have been a problem if we didn't have Axl with us when we went there. Axl is immune, so Zero still sees him as someone he'd have to go through to get to me, even if this one is completely untrained." And couldn't slow down Zero much more than one of those wooden walls. "Lumine will help even more, partially because while his tactical systems are dealing with the possibility of Lumine attacking me, they won't be obsessing over the possibility of Zero attacking me."

There was nothing that Dr. Light could say to this but "I'm sorry." For making X think of this. For X's friend. For the share of his burden that X shouldered, since he chose to be concerned for Zero and so this had to affect him as well. Seeing his friend suffering had to hurt, especially when X felt responsible for it. "For asking you that."

"No, it's one of those things like 'I thought you'd be taller,' that I hear a lot when I'm doing interviews." X said, and Dr. Light was glad to see him smile for a moment. "Iris, she's the one that asked Zero out, she was built to look like me by my friend, Dr. Cain. Developing romantic feelings for Zero is one of the cruelest possible things I could do to him. I was already forced to do one of the others, right after Iris' death." There was that hint of past sadness, past darkness again: there and gone, because X was _forced _to learn how to suppress those feelings, to function despite them. "Another during the Eurasia Incident. So I suppose that and dying are the only ones I haven't done yet. As for Zero's feelings for me, _philios_ and _eros_ are both emotional relationships between equals. He doesn't understand the concept of equals on an emotional level, only an intellectual one. There is a word for what he feels about me, but it's not one I'm comfortable with. I suppose it's good to have a word for what Zero is, and some more information, even if it's not a very good sample pool." 'Evil incarnate' was the usual description of the stardroids… and that didn't help X to understand his partner, who wasn't.

"You're not comfortable with your relationship?" Dr. Light asked, worried.

"No," X said simply. "Unfortunately… Even though I was built to have free will, what _I _want isn't always that simple. Not when I want Zero to be happy, and sometimes my preference for that will override my dislike of anyone… not thinking of themselves as a person who can and should make their own choices. Not to mention that how could I possibly be happy with how I have to be demonstrating my willingness to attack him for him to be at ease around me? I'm being very literal: there are ways to read his emotional state. It was a little better before he realized his origin, but even when I was his student… He _cannot _be calm unless I'm being violent or potentially violent towards him in some way: carrying a weapon means carrying a weapon I might use on him_,_ when I hate the thought of hurting him. He's my friend, so I want to be around him, but just being around him makes him afraid." What kind of person could be happy that just being near them made their friend upset instead of making them happy? Even if it was upset in _addition _to happy?

"Is there anyone else?" Dr. Light said, attempting a change of subject, and then realized that since X changed history, that was '_was_ there anyone else?' Any other loves X had would have to be lost ones, just like Zero's Iris.

"Alia? Usually I'm asked about her, after Zero." Ah, the perils of celebrity. "She's another person who swore off romance, I'm afraid." His son turned to look out the window. "Her first crush, well, there's really no way to say it other than that she nearly signed his death warrant because she was afraid that otherwise she was going to die. I don't think she so much _chose _that path as, well, she was young, she was in a nasty situation and she simply didn't have the necessary skills to make any other outcome possible, not when she was working against active opposition. She still wishes that she could have saved him, so she wants to believe that she was capable of saving him and actually chose not to save him." Poor, poor Alia: if only she was not quite such a good person, if only she was less of a hero, she would have been happier.

Dr. Light could read that on X's face because he was so familiar with that feeling himself.

"She hates it when people assume that she's fond of me in that way, because it reminds her of Dr. Gate, and feels like they're accusing her of planning to betray me. She's rather like Zero, in that being fond of someone would make her terrified of loving them. Not for her sake, but for theirs." Turning back to Dr. Light, X smiled and asked, "What about you?"

"I've always been overweight. My parents had me start doing martial arts at a young age to try to do something about it, but apparently it's just how I'm put together, and building all that muscle just made the number on the scale larger. I suppose it turned out to be a very good thing in the long run: Albert never took care of himself. Not enough sunlight or weight-bearing exercise: not when that would cut into lab time, and sleep?" Dr. Light chuckled. "Sleep was for the weak. Now that we're older, he's shriveled up to the point a lot of people accuse him of having a Napoleon Complex, seeing him hunched over. He used to be taller than I was."

"It is hard to believe." X said, smiling.

Dr. Light nodded. "I have pictures: Roll wouldn't believe me any more than you do, not without evidence. I'm still in very good health," he told X. Thirty years wasn't an impossibility, just unlikely. "Especially with Roll looking after me, and I still do exercises in the mornings, of course. Still, because there's this assumption that being overweight means lazy and stupid with no self-control, which aren't exactly appealing traits, I think I ended up convinced that no one would really be interested in me, and I did keep rather to myself. Then, well, then I had money, and I became even more convinced that no one would be interested in _me_. Not when there were robots." Who would ask Dr. Light about himself when his work was obviously far more fascinating?

"It's hard to imagine, but has Dr. Wily ever had a serious relationship?"

Thomas laughed out loud. "I do have to show you those pictures of him when he was younger. What you said about romance being a relationship between equals… He was convinced that there was no one on Earth that was his intellectual equal, and sad to say he may be right. A lot of people asked him out, but he could make _anyone _furious enough to want to punch him within about five seconds."

"Even you?" X wondered.

"If I'd had a little more of an ego, probably," Dr. Light admitted. "Even though he rather liked me. More as a little brother than anything. I could understand_… most _of what he had to say after a little bit of time to think about it, and our teachers didn't. I think he enjoyed the novelty of having someone within shouting distance of his genius. He was starved of intelligent conversation, and was happy to get semi-intelligent."

"Don't put yourself down like that," his son chided him, sounding more like the adult.

"Oh no, actually, I think the whole experience rather helped me believe in myself. It's very true that most people judge the intelligence of others by how much they agree with us, and my appearance always counted against me, although it would have been much worse if I was a woman and overweight, or any number of other combinations. When I tried to make my doctoral project robots with their own consciousness, their own system of value judgments and ability to make choices, I was told 'You should put your genius to better use than those fairy tales,' because of course I was only a genius if I did things that they valued. Otherwise, I was a deluded child, a chubby little baby-faced boy." Dr. Light snorted with contempt: much easier to feel that way now that he was older and wiser. At the time, it was devastating. "They were the experts: if _they _couldn't see the necessity of something, then obviously it couldn't be necessary. Or even possible."

"Robots with free will…"

"If I'd listened to them, I wouldn't have Rock. Or you." Also, humanity might have been wiped out already. "As I've said, I was smart enough to realize that Albert was _brilliant_, and he thought I had the right idea. He didn't respect _anyone,_ but here I was, and I'd managed to earn some of his respect." That meant something. "Working together, we made incredible progress, simply incredible. The first robot with the ability to form opinions about situations, feel emotions, was the subject of my doctoral thesis and it would have taken me decades without him. It wasn't even just that he solved problems for me, that he had ideas: it was incredible working with someone that brilliant. Talking to him, tossing ideas back and forth, working on B- Well, I've never really felt so alive. I learned a lot about _how _to have ideas and make them reality from him."

"Do you mind if I ask what happened?"

"Of course not. And I should be apologizing to you for making you think about painful subjects. But honestly, nothing happened. Albert didn't change. He's exactly the same person he was back then, except he has more people that he cares about."

"That's… supposed to be a good thing, but not when the people you care about are sentenced to death just for existing."

Dr. Light nodded. "I'm sure he thought he was doing me a favor by kidnapping the First Numbers, and then rescuing them when they were going to be destroyed because of what they did after he reprogrammed them. When destruction after a certain age was mandated by law, he saved those children as well. He's brilliant, and that means he has a great deal of power, but I knew that robots needed choice so that they could choose to care. Albert doesn't care about humans other than myself, and maybe there are some other exceptions somewhere. I doubt it, he would have mentioned them to me." Instead of acting as though Thomas was in a category by himself, and it was _shocking _that there was _anyone _who existed that fell in that category. "That time they pardoned him to try to get him to build a war robot for them," although it was a longer story than that, "Rock thought he turned over a new leaf, but the way he acted wasn't anything new, it wasn't a change, it just meant he liked the boy. It didn't mean he wasn't determined to betray the UN as thoroughly as possible." _Solitary_, for six months? Dr. Light had _known _that wasn't possibly going to end well, and all he could do was try to make sure Rock survived the fallout when Wily's inevitable betrayal (but then, he'd never been on their side in the first place, coerced into assisting the mission to the asteroid) came.

"So he hasn't changed since graduate school… he hasn't grown up?"

"How would you define adulthood? We were creating life, fully prepared to take responsibility for it." Dr. Light winced. "Albert is significantly _less _dangerous when he's playing around than when he's being mature and responsible. A lot of people try to label him as some kind of manchild: I wish he was, fewer people would be dead. He may _say _that the wars are about his ego, but he's trying to teach his children to run a war. To defend themselves. The fact he gets to kick the ass of 'the man' in the process combines business and pleasure. Every time the WRO has one of their horribly exploitationist events, I can count on him to sabotage it.

"No. He may not respect other humans, but he wouldn't let them be killed if he was just playing around. It would smack of incompetence. Despite how high of an opinion he has of himself, he doesn't take care of himself, as I said. He wouldn't really go _that _far for his own sake. Being insulted, being overlooked: it gets on his nerves so badly because it happened over and over, and perhaps because they rub it in that there aren't any humans that understand him. If he was as stupid as they like to say, if he really was less intelligent than I am, then he would have peers. Then there would be people just as dumb as he was, able to understand him. Between the Fifth and Sixth Wars, before he put an infrastructure together mostly so that his robots would always have the resources to repair themselves with, there was one winter I was worried he was going to die of exposure." Dr. Light pressed a hand to his forehead. "He doesn't value his own life enough, really he doesn't. He cares about his robots and their wellbeing far more than his own. It can't have been easy, never having anyone that understood him, and then they put him in solitary confinement for six months. He might not be _insane_, but he's certainly not healthy."

"Irregular. A unit that's different enough from the norm, that… Things go wrong with them, and they need help. Even when the difference isn't actually a defect." Defects could be fixed.

Dr. Light looked up, worried. "It's alright to feel sorry for him; I certainly do, but don't underestimate him. He is _very _dangerous." Not to mention that underestimating him was _insulting _him, and Dr. Light didn't want X to be in _that _kind of danger.

X nodded, or perhaps it was more that he was bowing his head. "I know someone that is brilliant, even if not in quite the same way. Someone different from everyone around him, someone that doesn't value his own life enough. He's _very _dangerous, especially when someone he cares about is on the line."

"And you're not frightened of him," which was truly a relief, "but for him, and everyone around him." At least not normally, but things happened in wars. It was quite possible that Dr. Wily or one of his creations _would _end up killing Dr. Light and his other children. A mad genius was not a safe person to know, but then, trying to force people to be safe was how things like the Three Laws happened. Danger was a fact of life.

Another nod, and this time, when X's eyes were looking back at the past, it didn't seem as though there were only sad things there, or maybe it was that fondness that made the difference. That he was thinking of the person he'd managed to pull through all those terrible things, and it made them seem worth it.

"Well, you're doing better than I am," Dr. Light told him, and patted him on the shoulder. "Would you like something to drink?" Dr. Light needed some water after his exercises.

After Dr. Light went through the patio door, X felt Roll looking at him, and not just through the cameras. He looked up at the second-floor window she was leaning out of and asked, "Hmm?"

"You're not just older than I am," and she and Rock were the first two robot masters activated. "You're older than _Dr. Light_."

"…I'm used to being the old one, actually." When he was ancient compared to all but a handful of reploids, even leaving his hibernation out of it. "Did you manage to find anything in Rock's systems?"

Roll looked excited. "That's just it. There's nothing. It's not even that it covered its tracks: there's _nothing_. Something was acting on his systems, making him not log data or allow commands he wasn't generating to operate his body, but there was nothing inside his systems that could possibly have those effects."

"The virus is very good at camouflage, I'm afraid."

"No," she said crossly. "When I say there was nothing, I mean _there was nothing_." She was a robot master: she knew of what she spoke, and even through it wasn't X's fault he didn't understand, it was still reminding her of the insulting ignorance of people who thought that robots couldn't know what they were talking about. "He said Zero said he kept it from changing his personality: I think it stayed outside his program code the entire time. If it was just hanging out in his program code, Dr. Light and I go over it all the time, and Rock does too. Even before Zero decided he didn't want to change anything, Wily's virus was probably programmed not to risk it." It didn't need to appear inside program code, the domain of robot masters, if it could control it from outside somehow.

"Nanite-only, then? I thought you weren't compatible."

"Right, not compatible. I don't think it works that way for us." They probably were incompatible in the way X was nanite-compatible. "I think you had such a tough time with your virus because it's magic." Not just because reploids weren't robot masters, and were therefore even less equipped to deal with viruses than humans were. Reploids were copies of X's baseline design minus all the beta testing he did, while humans had lots and lots of beta testing under their species' belt.

"…Sufficiently advanced technology," he translated. "Something that looks like magic, like it's something that doesn't follow any scientific rules or principles because we don't recognize what we're looking at, so we don't know the principles that govern it."

Roll grinned. "Sorry for insulting you by not figuring that out before. I mean, _that _many decades? You would have figured it out _ages_ ago, unless it was something from out of left field, something that wasn't playing by the normal rules. Even if you're not robot masters, there are only so many ways programming viruses can work, and you probably figured out the rules of nanite viruses, too."

"But if it was only pretending to be those things, if it was exploiting another system vulnerability all along…"

"You can't block what you don't know about," Roll agreed. "That's Dr. Wily all over; he likes laughing at people who make assumptions, like 'it has to be an energy tank because what else could it be' and 'teleportation is impossible.'"

"Like time travel." X grinned up at her. "The sound that precedes scientific discovery isn't Eureka."

That wasn't quite how she'd heard the quote; but even though it was attributed to Asimov, there didn't seem to be any reliable sources and it probably got even more distorted between now and whenever X heard it. Even though Dr. Light used to like Asimov, others viewing the Three Laws as a _solution _instead of a thought experiment pointing out the problems with the concept had rather ruined it for him. "It's 'Huh, that's funny…'"

* * *

_Compared to Classic, X series is relatively hard SF. In my 'verses, they think that the stories about aliens and time travel are Dr. Wily lies: remember that one game with the fake flying saucer? They probably think that Quint and Duo were just more Wilybots, etc. _

_And then X5 and Zero coming back to life, and you have to wonder if at least the Hunter high command who were cleared for this were going 'Holy $%*$%^, are we in a cosmic horror story?' _

_Cyber-elves… Their capabilities explain why the world was having such a hard time doing anything about the Maverick Virus. In one of my fics, at first they think it's program code, a regular computer virus, then they find out it's spreading through nanites, and there are things that can be done about both of those vectors_. _But the virus has a third trick up its sleeve, and put yourself in the mindset of someone from a harder science fiction setting (except teleportation) and then look at cyber-elves and their capabilities. _

_Reverse engineer Zero, and you get a floaty glowy thing with what amounts to _magical powers? _The maverick virus is being spread by effing _fairies? _Are you kidding me? What sane person would guess that something that ludicrous is the reason the virus gets around all their countermeasures?_

_Effing mad scientists… _

_Someone needs to fic Dr. Ciel's ancestress and Weil, the people that were studying Zero and figured out the cure, trying to examine his physical systems, and then what they needed wasn't in the _physical _systems, and then… just all the stages of epic, epic, What Even Is This WTFery. Even knowing that the Nightmares were a thing that happened. _

_If you're wondering why this chapter didn't address X's reaction to Zero killing his younger self, wait for it._


	10. Still Alive

_I'm sorry for the delay: my sleep schedule has killed my ability to notice errors and copy-edit, so Haruna Rei was kind enough to offer to beta for me, and then her glasses self-destructed with hateful vengeance. I've tried to edit it myself, of course, but my apologies for the sentence structure and things I didn't catch. They'll be fixed after her new glasses arrive._

_This fic has foiled my second attempt to get it to wrap up nicely: this time it's because I made the mistake of underestimating Dr. Wily. Even if I scrap a couple chapters, there's just no one who could reasonably get into position to prevent a certain event. _

_I'm not following my usual gameverse headcanon here: I like the idea that Blues is the sadbot from the manga, making Rock 001 and Blues 000 since Rock was the first purpose-built robot master and Blues was an earlier unit retrofitted to robot master level, and then upgraded further by Dr. Wily because Dr. Wily hates stupid people. I think he keeps tossing IQ upgrades at his robot masters in hopes that someday they'll use them, but they're all less than five years old and there's only so much raw IQ can do. He was probably also hoping that more intelligence would cure the suicidal, since dying is stupid and his kids really shouldn't go and die. _

_Yes, Blues is maverick. However, he was also a stardroid before, and while he may have gone around dismembering his younger siblings, and inciting Forte to blow up several city blocks, and massacring Sniper Joes because their existence offended him, and threatening to shoot Kalin-Um. Yeah. Too much optimism would be a little bad here. _

_I _really _like the idea that Dr. Light's first and last creations were both built to develop wills of their own. _

* * *

"Hey there," he said, crouching down and ending up with a lapful of cat. He found himself smiling softly as he leaned forward, curling around Tango a little, strands of his black hair yielding to gravity. Tango was probably damaging his shirt, sitting in his lap and pawing at his chest, checking to see that he was real. He let the support unit initiate wireless contact, even though he should be worried about contaminating the little thing. Probably he was letting it happen because Tango was worried about him, but he couldn't be sure…

Tango must have gone home, and seen the helmet that Star Man found and Dr. Wily passed on to Dr. Light. It was a nice gesture up until the point that Dr. Wily found him and didn't tell Dr. Light. So his support unit was left to mourn, and wander out into the city to curl up in some of Blues' temporary camps and mope.

He'd thought that he was the one looking after Tango (how did a green robot cat end up on the _continent?) _when it was the support unit that was looking after him, all along. Now that he was checking logs, he found Dr. Light thinking aloud while petting Tango, because he needed someone to tell and he couldn't burden Rock like that. Didn't want him to know that the unit that kept attacking him and his other siblings was his own brother.

Tango was so glad he was alive, and that was nice on more than one level now, but maybe he should have seen if he could get any information out of the piece of Ra Moon that was hanging around Mega Man. Soaking up the energy it gave off must have restarted the crystal in place of his heart, according to Dr. Wily's theories about Ra Moon and his notes on what Terra said in the files Blues hacked while playing still-booting-up. He'd drained all the energy it was using to hang around and control Mega Man, but if he was able to put up with seeing that even a little longer, he could have gotten a little more.

Since he'd been upgraded from a robot to a robot master, it was reassuring to have a support unit, even if he didn't have dozens of robots like most of them did. It was also a relief that Tango was still alive, after what Terra did to the poor thing when he sensed the defective stardroid and Tango tried to help him. Even though he was hooked into the cat's wireless, it was still a relief to feel that head pressing up under his chin. He moved his arms to be a more secure platform for the unit, and called up the familiar patterns of his coat and scarf, flung over his shoulders instead of with his arms through the sleeves so it wouldn't be so obvious the cat was robotic.

He'd used his scarf to bind up Tango, after Terra shot the poor cat. He could try to find what was left of it later, but it was so shredded he would have had to try to find a new one if he hadn't been reactivated with these capabilities.

After editing matter into existence he was dangerously low on energy, and it wasn't the Third Law trying to force him to do something about that. He wasn't registering that he was low on energy: instead he was casting about for energy sources, and _feeling _as though he should take them. That they were there for the taking, instead of there because people had their own souls, had made their own choices about what they wanted to feel, what they wanted to do.

Feelings were his purpose: he could tell when there was something that different about his own. A survival instinct was not something he should have. Robot masters were supposed to _learn _why love was important, learn to love life, their own lives and those of other people, and choose to act to continue to live, so they could choose to act to allow others to live their lives as well. A heedless drive, that forced people to have certain impulses independent of their souls' wishes: that was as counter to his creators' wishes as the Three Laws.

He was certain that Tango wouldn't mind Blues using him as a generator, as long as it stayed passive. When the little unit risked their life to bring Blues an e-can while injured, they would be glad that they were helping Blues continue functioning just by being here, just by wanting him to live. He wasn't going to force Tango to produce energy, the way Terra tried to squeeze despair out of the world.

Still, he thought, heading for the warehouse's side door, he was supposed to live by his own will. Develop his own preferences, realize on his own what he wanted to protect.

With Tango, there were enough people living in the city that he could meet baseline energy requirements passively, he calculated. He didn't mind peoplewatching, although now, it might be better to stick close to the screaming arguments instead of finding somewhere else to be. If he needed more energy, say for editing the files that compromised his buster arm from 'damaged' to 'intact,' then well, he'd better hope he'd hit something when he fired.

He smirked: his reputation might come in handy there. After the incident with the Copy, everyone knew he was terrifying.

It was disturbing how easily he was adjusting to this idea, but then, he'd made major transitions twice before. The first time when he was granted full sapience and a humanoid body, but imprisoned by the laws, and the second when Dr. Wily woke him up and announced that he didn't _care _if Blues didn't particularly want to live, he was getting a new lease on life like it or not. Shortly thereafter, he'd gone independent, and had to work out how to acquire all those new survival necessities, things his old body hadn't needed. Like clothing.

Reality editing meant he wouldn't have parts requirements anymore. Not as long as he had the energy, and any sentient being could provide that. They didn't even have to be fully sapient: look at Tango.

The urgent thing now was finding out what he'd missed while he was drifting around in space. Going over the data he'd gotten from Wily's systems. What exactly Dr. Wily had done when he'd built that unit based on Sunstar, with more than a few touches of Ra Moon's capabilities. Reducing a planet to an asteroid belt? Eh, there were hundreds of ways to render Earth lifeless. _Controlling _an entire planet, what they heard and saw, though? Tapping into their minds, uploading data to them?

Now _that _had potential. He could almost hear Albert saying those very words. A channel that could upload video files: could it upload mind-viruses?

Terra only used it to try to show people the truth of what was going on, but that was thinking too small. Why not generate nightmares to inflict on a target world? Or were the stardroids simply too powerful for their progenitors, with no need to bother with anything but crude techniques? Were they war machines instead of Dr. Light's system managers? Built to kill instead of to guide and direct. Rock's direct approach, using personal power and violence to accomplish his wishes was… unusual. Not what Dr. Light wished for, even though Blues was sure that he didn't see his nightmares when he looked at Rock. No, it was Dr. Cossack who feared that robots would be used as weapons of war. Dr. Light feared a world where robots would crush people underfoot and not have the capacity to notice or care.

Or, even more nightmarish, _not be able to stop themselves from following orders _even if they did realize that they were hurting people and that was wrong.

Mega Man cared. Mega Man fought to protect, had _chosen _to fight to protect his family, the people he'd learned to care about. He fought for everyone's futures. That was why he was a hero.

Terra hadn't used Ra Moon's powers to their full potential for whatever reason, but it would be simple for Dr. Wily to figure out some of Ra Moon's true capabilities from what the world observed. If Ra Moon was even a separate entity, instead of a mass of the energy that animated all the stardroids. If that was the case, then the energy cloud Blues tapped had been just as much this 'Zero' as the portion of that energy being animating the android body Dr. Wily built it as a host. It was obvious why he'd picked an android host body instead of a robot master: android self-repair capability would cover use of reality editing for self-repair, and who would suspect an android of hooking into systems and controlling other units? X was supposed to be incapable of that, so he'd experience the world closer to how humans did, end up with a psychology closer to theirs instead of that of a hive species.

Humans looked after themselves: robot masters came into the world knowing that there were little lives that needed them. "You tricked me," he accused Tango, tapping the cat on the nose. They were on the sidewalk now, almost into the shopping district, so better confine his musings to wireless. _"Into looking after you." _Into staying alive_. "Just like Rock and Dr. Light… Or no, that's very Albert, isn't it. He set it up so they would crash into the asteroid, but he told Dr. Light that he'd see him when he got back to Earth. He knew that I'd stay to make sure that they were alright."_ At the time, he'd told himself that it was the First Law forcing him, but he'd _wanted _to just shut down. Standing there and letting Dr. Light die would have gotten him what he wanted… if it was truly what he wanted. His own will.

"_If Dr. Light hadn't sabotaged Gamma since he knew Albert wouldn't put up with the UN ordering him to build a robot-killer without some plan to take it over, Rock and I wouldn't have been able to take it, not and stay intact enough to protect Dr. Light from the security robots there and get the ship repaired and back to Earth. He can't have been expecting me to emerge from the teleporter, dismember the Third Numbers and get out of his base on my own."_ Not after damaging his buster saving the ship and then helping Rock with Gamma.

"_Realistically, should I have won that fight? True, most of them were taken down by friendly fire,"_ the Third Numbers did more damage to each other in that fight than he did to them, and they'd been hampered by the presence of Dr. Wily. Getting him out of there before one of his brothers accidently killed him took Shadow Man out of the fight, and he was the one who could have pursued Blues and brought him back before he repaired himself… before he recovered. _"The stardroids were combat units, I might have had subconscious access to their combat programming, but I didn't really have skill, not yet."_ He was decades older than the rest of them, but he'd only had a few weeks conscious in a humanoid body, and he was reactivated after the Third Numbers were turned on. _"I've never had luck. I already had fusion operation and teleportation programming: was I using alteration to make sure they missed, even without being aware of it?"_

The capabilities of Terra and the other stardroids… _"I don't think the species that build Asteroid Omega had a Dr. Light or Dr. Wily,"_ he realized. _"Terra and the others… If they didn't have their own wills, then they couldn't have used Ra Moon's powers to their full extent. But all of us except Rock and a handful of others constantly operate fusion reactors, and even he teleports. Quantum observation is… yes, rather like breathing: it's an automatic, background process, but we can take conscious control over it. Every single robot master could use this reality editing capability, if it was installed into them." _Blues must have used it without even being aware of it, since it never showed up on the level of his program code. "_Elec Man would be especially dangerous, since he manages large-scale energy generation… _invocation _on several continents simultaneously now. On the other hand, if the stardroids had their own wills, then they could have fought the influence of the crystals. Maybe that species wouldn't be extinct if they'd given their robots the ability to realize when an order was wrong and the right to refuse to follow it."_ The things Dr. Light believed were necessities. _"If the stardroids arrived after the WRO had its way…" _He hit up the WRO's robot master registry: how bad were the casualties from fighting the stardroids? What was the rate of robot master construction over the past… "What?!" he demanded, aloud and enraged.

Stopping suddenly meant someone bumped into him: he was too angry to even respond to their automatic "Excuse me."

"_Mandatory _retirement?!" Thank goodness Dr. Wily stopped it, or else… All the goodwill Dr. Light hoped for would have been ruined. Rock would have been forced to watch humans murder his younger siblings, and after the first Destruction Order? He'd raced there to save them, according to the reports of the Second Numbers, that was clear. Rock would _not _have left tamely, not when people were going to die.

If _all _of Dr. Light's children were executed for turning against humans on the day scheduled, the day that would have come if Dr. Wily hadn't struck first? Of course Roll wouldn't have escaped that fate, not when she had so much coding in common with the others, not when the rest of Dr. Light's children were labeled defective, and he'd registered his objections to the Three Laws. They would have accused him of not installing them properly, of aiding and abetting Dr. Wily somehow…

He had _not _gotten this angry before Dr. Wily rebuilt him with the crystal. His default was sadness, not anger. He was _named _for that melancholy, for the music he loved that expressed it.

Blues couldn't remember getting this angry since he was rebuilt as a warbot either. He'd just felt tired, all the time. Tired and sharp-edged, like the jagged edges of the broken crystal. Had the crystal drained away the emotions he would have felt otherwise, to power keeping him alive? Draining his soul in order to sustain his life, the life he hadn't wanted.

Except… except Rock needed him, and Forte felt so much he couldn't control it, not yet, and Blues had something he wanted to protect.

The Destruction Order this time… it was so transparent. If it was due to actual concern about _robots _becoming erratic and dangerous as they got older, even though that was _ridiculous _when making sure that robots stayed in good shape was one of the things robot masters were _for_, then they should have targeted units like Tango. People's pet robots. No, it was nothing but an excuse to reduce the number of robot masters, remove the ones that humans had grown attached to, the ones that might have learned enough of the world to start caring about humans the way Dr. Light wished, but, in the eyes of these people, the 'other' was always going to be the enemy, and knowledge was power. Humans that would help robots were humans that would help 'the enemy.'

They'd come _this close _to destroying all of Dr. Light's dreams, even if the repeal of the first Destruction Order meant the original eight were grandfathered in? A masterful stroke, that, because the voters would have been outraged over Mega Man's death, and this way their enemies could set the precedent, could make people feel that Mega Man was _special_, and so it was alright that all _other _robot masters were murdered…

He couldn't have helped if he was here. He might even be a poster boy for those people, if they knew he predated the Third Numbers. All the robot masters knew he was powerful and dangerously erratic: if they knew he was a _Lightbot… _

If those people weren't racist hypocrites that didn't want to pick a fight with companies that wouldn't have wanted to replace their old, non-sentient units, then Tango might be _dead_.

He had to stop walking for a moment, and he heard Tango's worried mew. The support unit knew what it looked like, when Blues had to focus all of his attention on diagnostics. The feeling in his chest wasn't pain, not like when the White Giant drew closer to the planet, not like when he met Terra, when the powerful alien radiating cruelty said he was one of them. Broken, a failure, but that wasn't news.

He should be in pain right now: he knew these symptoms. The difference between now and before was that he had Dr. Wily's energy virus in addition to the crystal: so it was regulating the crystal to some extent?

That was good to know, and he wasn't going to complain about not having to periodically shut down his pain sensors. Having them off was a good way to develop some problem and not find out about it until he was dead.

Right, of course Dr. Wily wouldn't want his creations to end up like the stardroids. He still hated having additional outside programming in his systems, but if it countered the crystal's attempts to influence him? The virus might even be the reason he was aware of this drive to get energy now. If you didn't know about something, then you couldn't control it.

What would Zero… what would Zero _feel _like, when he wasn't hovering around Rock?

He'd avoided socializing with people for years, except for Tango: the very fact he _wanted _to meet one more Wilybot, much less a stardroid, was obviously a red flag. Honestly, possessing Mega Man like that was technically impressive, but it was Dr. Wily's work, not his own, and it said terrible things about his character. Someone who risked the lives of robots like that, without even bothering to understand their programming and the Three Laws?

This Zero was _not _the center of the universe.

He didn't like what he was finding in his systems. He needed to do some survey, figure out how much of the difference was due to the virus and how much was from the crystal, were only things that seemed like changes because he was only becoming aware of them now. He headed into an alley, getting out of sight long enough to teleport up to one of his favorite roofs. Thank goodness it was still there: he realized only after he'd already arrived that it could have been destroyed by the stardroids, or Forte, or urban renewal, in the time he was gone. No, he wasn't thinking clearly, he knew, putting Tango down and removing his coat from his shoulders.

At least the roof was still here and it still had that cold breeze.

He needed to try to get at the coding of this thing. This couldn't just be the trap embodied in the crystals: they turned intelligent robots into berserkers, there wasn't any _subtlety _there. Not to mention that it had overwritten his eyes red, and that was Dr. Wily's color.

Wonderful. He had _Dr. Wily's _programming trying to tamper with his emotions, when he and Dr. Light were the ones who worked on that learning system to begin with. One of the two people who understood best that robots had real feelings also understood _why _they felt certain things. Since Ra Moon could control what people perceived, then of _course _Dr. Wily's virus wouldn't do something as obvious as trying to control his emotions, it would control the data he was looking at and having emotions about. Try to convince him to feel the way Dr. Wily thought they all should feel, especially about the humans that used them.

So: he couldn't trust his emotional reactions. He couldn't trust what he was seeing. He'd have to remember what _he _wanted, and be on guard against what he observed changing that.

Low on water. He could fix that, and generating water seemed like a harmless way to practice with these new abilities, but now his energy reserves were low. Tango was already peering about: the cat knew this place, so he must be trying to figure out where the nearest store was that he could shoplift an e-can from. Blues patted him on the head. "It's alright, I'll take care of this." Even though he appreciated everything Tango had done, to keep him alive. Make him keep himself alive. He needed to do this himself, to get some data on how to meet his energy requirements.

…Terrifying humans was horrible publicity for robot masters (although they didn't have to know he was one), and also _cruel_. He should _not _be thinking of terrifying, no, of attacking them, as the default way to refuel.

Nope, Dr. Wily certainly hadn't even tried to override all of the stardroid defaults. Not when he kept losing because robot masters found hurting others so counterproductive.

…And now he found himself wondering if he'd held that buster to Kalinka Cossack's head that day because it was the optimum way to keep her and everyone else safe, because he was feeling self-destructive and felt like tempting the First and Second Laws, or because her shock and betrayal, the way everyone stared at him in horror…

No, he was _not _going to apologize. He didn't like explaining himself and the last thing he should want to do was socialize, get access to the Cossackbot network when he was _carrying an energy virus_. He'd already infected Tango. No. The Cossacks had lost enough to the wars. He was not going to let it use him like this. He was going to _not _start a panic, but wander around and passively refuel, and then he was going to get back to trying to hack into what had to be a two-way data link between his systems and the energy virus. If this thing's programming _couldn't even control its own avatar_, then he wasn't going to let it control his soul, any more than he'd let the Three Laws rule him.


	11. Second Opinion

_In theory, I am well aware that the fic has too much talking. However, I _like _the talking, and seeing characters interact, and fun worldbuilding and such, so I'm going to keep doing fanservice-for-me, or rather author appeal._

_If it helps, there will be a final boss._

* * *

The rider took off her helmet, revealing blonde hair about half as long as Zero's. Still wearing a heavy coat, she dismounted from the snowmobile.

"Kalinka Cossack?" Zero asked, glad he wasn't wearing armor.

She nodded, not coming any closer, which seemed eminently sensible to him. He and Axl had stopped sparring when the snowmobile crossed the border of their property, because Axl was using rapid-fire energy bullets with a decent range and it would only take one. The shots were low-powered, because 20XX weapons generally were by 21XX standards and X didn't want them to kill too much of their tree cover, but humans were squishy. Also, X borrowed Auto's lab to put these together since even with his dislike of people getting shot the veteran didn't want Axl unarmed, and his first priority had been building something that was unlikely to blow up in Axl's hands even though X was working with unfamiliar parts. He'd also built a pair each for himself and Zero, so Zero could demonstrate for Axl and the two of them had weapons that were built in this century and weren't obviously Lighttech.

Axl didn't have any default, built-in weapons: he was supposed to copy enemies, or other Wilybots presumably, and use theirs, but that just went to show, Zero thought, that Wily _had no idea how combat training worked_. Axl needed to get _something _down, for self-defense, and _then _he could work on expanding his range of weapons. What kind of idiot expected a newbuilt to instantly master fighting not just with a variety of weapons with different specs that changed how Axl would have to use them if he wanted to win, but with a variety of _body types_? That completely changed what Axl would have to do to avoid getting hit? Sure, Axl might have pre-programmed dodge routines, but if he didn't understand the mechanics of it, how and why certain things worked for his body, then how was he supposed to adapt them for entirely different bodies? Not just height and weight, but center of balance, different articulation, dash boots or no dash boots…

No, Axl's copy chip meant that until he learned how to learn, he was useless against anyone who saw him coming. No wonder he had such an uphill battle trying to get Red Alert to allow him out on field missions: the Repliforce veteran was old enough to think outside the box, otherwise he wouldn't have disobeyed General's orders and left Repliforce before the end, and he must have recognized that Axl needed more training than the standard newbuilt.

Of course Axl would have whined and complained about that, when his friends were out there and he was training instead of _helping them_, but since no one was getting hurt at the moment, this Axl took to training much more happily than their Axl. This Axl was duly impressed by Zero's tricks and wanted to learn them, while their Axl, although he admired Zero, had a tendency to go "Yeah, that's great, but _why am I not in the field when my friends are getting shot at?!" _Fortunately, Zero had cured him of saying anything like "The only _real _training is field testing," in front of impressionable newbuilts before it got any of them killed_. Axl _was immune: they weren't.

If they were back in 21XX, Zero could probably build a functional pair of energy pistols, come to think of it. He'd trained with every weapon he could get his hands on, so he would know their capabilities and limitations if an enemy tried to use them against him. Disassembly for cleaning and field repairs were part of weapons training, so he knew the general part types and how you hooked different varieties of them up in different combinations to produce different specs. Knowing that meant testing out a captured enemy weapon gave him a lot of tactically valuable information.

X was the one with formal training as an engineer, though. In addition, the Elite Seventeenth was a heavy artillery unit, since X would rather the mavericks didn't get anywhere close to the reploids he was looking after. Especially since once a war started, he wouldn't be there to look after them. That meant X spent a lot of time training his newbuilts in the use and field repair of various things that hopefully made other people go boom. The Shinobi unit, on the other hand... Zero's recruits were either promoted into it after surviving a certain amount of time without death or infection in another unit, or purpose-built and trained before coming into the Hunters. If they didn't already know how to take proper care of their weapons, they weren't going to qualify for his training. It had been decades since he'd handled someone's training from scratch instead of having them come in thinking they knew what they were doing and having to be cured of their bad habits.

Even though both of them were unarmored, they were still armed Wilybots. Not an insignificant threat.

A background tactical process was calculating the speed and acceleration of that snowmobile, how fast she could probably get back on it and comparing it to what the presence of all this snow was doing to his top speed. Even Axl could easily shoot her, but she was staying out of easy grabbing range. When he corrected for the differences between an android's structure and a robot master's, she wasn't just out of _easy _grabbing range. Huh. Fairly impressive. He liked people who were good at not being killed.

Not good enough, and obviously she knew that, given the bit of tightness around her eyes. They could kill her easily, but capturing her, to use her against her family: that would take a little work, for someone who wasn't him.

"I'm here to speak to X, if he's free," she said, and Zero nodded.

"If you want to drive up to the house, you'll find him there," he told her, instead of offering to escort her. She would have to slow down so he could keep up with her without pushing it, and she'd probably feel safer talking to a potential Maverick – a Wilybot – with X there. It was only sensible.

"My GPS doesn't have the house's location on the property," she said, which made sense, given the place's defenses. A lot of people had privacy tech up these days, according to Roll when Zero asked if it would attract attention. It wasn't visible from where they stood, either: there were several little valleys, otherwise Zero wouldn't have wanted to risk practicing outside, even if Axl needed to learn to deal with terrain. "Would you mind showing me where it is?" she asked, and smiled, trying to have it reach her eyes.

…That seemed like a deliberate effort not to be mistrustful, to ignore her survival instincts, but then he thought about it, and compared her to Dr. Light.

Dr. Light didn't even seem worried when he was in the same room with Forte, forget Zero, although Forte was in Roll's custody at the time. He'd been kidnapped before too, but Kalinka was the one who had been around robot masters since she was a child. Why was she more wary than the old man?

Zero nodded. "Axl, go on ahead and tell X that Kalinka's here."

"Is that necessary?" she wondered, when the newbuilt ran off.

"We're not robot masters," he reminded her. "There isn't a network on the property. X and I have secure comms, but secure by 21XX standards isn't secure against Dr. Wily." The real reason was that in theory, one was less of a threat than two. They were numerically even now, and hopefully that would help her calm down her tactical. Her rational mind would know that even without Axl, Zero was still just as deadly, but it wasn't the problem.

"Or someone with a robot master of their own." Some robot master's _owner, _when X and Zero were hiding from the authorities. "Nothing's secure against Dr. Wily."

"I assume you wouldn't have come unless it was safe for us?" he asked her.

"I have a fondness for fast vehicles," she told him, getting back on the snowmobile and starting the engine. "I spend a lot of time riding various things, when I'm not helping my family." No one would care if she spent a few days driving around a national park, even if anyone was watching her movements.

"The engine doesn't sound the same as it did before," he remarked.

She nodded. "It's not traditional, but this is quieter."

Zero understood that: there were a lot of reploids who liked the noises their vehicles made. "Follow me, then. Or you could follow Axl's tracks." It would be awhile before Zero tried to teach him to move with stealth in the snow, even though Axl liked that kind of thing. Zero knew the limits of Axl's stealth capabilities when facing off against 21XX tech, but he needed to get a robot master involved in Axl's training, see what their capabilities did to the equation. Of course Axl's current abilities wouldn't be ineffective: Dr. Wily built him to go up against robot masters, at least in this timeline, but Axl had worked out quite a few new tricks in his time with the Shinobi Unit and Zero had no idea which ones would still be effective in 20XX. He wasn't going to teach his student something that would get him shot.

That meant the first priority was making sure that Axl could take care of himself if the enemy located him.

It didn't occur to Zero to ask himself 'what enemy?' There had always been conflict, someone had been Zero's enemy ever since his original activation. His experiences meant he saw war as the default state of the universe, and it would be odd if no one was trying to kill him or X in the same way it would be odd if water decided to flow uphill. The peace X sought to create was, if not quite a fairy tale to Zero, something entirely theoretical. A nice idea: not impossible, but if it was real, you wouldn't call it a dream.

Kalinka kept glancing at him, which he noted but didn't really think was odd until she apologized. "You remind me of someone," she said. "I wonder Dr. Wily built you in memory of him."

"Oh?" he asked her.

"Roll sent me images of you in armor. Red, grey and your hair, that yellow…" She shook her head. "Normally I have better manners than to stare at people. I could say 'my brothers are robot masters,' but that sounds too much like 'my best friend is a robot master' for comfort, even though Roll is my best friend."

She was talking about racism, Zero realized. "I'm a Wilybot." And odds were he'd killed more than the rest of them put together, although saying that wouldn't help her. "You've been kidnapped and held hostage by Wilybots twice, so if you're nervous around me, I'll attribute it to that." To purely reasonable caution and correctly functioning tactical systems.

She stared at him for a moment. "Did I say something wrong?" he asked her.

"No," she shook her head. "I'm glad that you didn't count Skull Man as a Wilybot, even though that man insisted on working on him." There seemed to be more to it than that, but Zero wasn't going to press her on it. Skull Man was a Cossackbot: had he kidnapped Kalinka? There wasn't anything like that in the Mega Man stories Zero knew about.

He kept trudging through the snow and trees for a bit, staying at least a meter from the snowmobile even though the track wasn't all that wide, since the trunks it meandered around were limiting factors. Nature. He'd prefer to leave it, but X had taken him for a walk last night, far enough away from the house that there was no mechanical noise, and it was so _quiet_. With all the snow around, it would have been impossible for anyone to sneak up on them: it was a clear night too, so cloud cover wasn't a problem.

When X sighed, and said, "Isn't it peaceful," looking up at the stars, though, Zero ended up with the impression that X expected him to agree, but for reasons other than the tactical ones, given that X sighed again after Zero hit the high points, and this time it was with familiar, fond irritation (Zero being Zero, meaning all of his partner's systems were operating normally even if what was normal for Zero wasn't normal by anyone else's standards) instead of relaxation.

It wasn't that he minded quiet, unless it was the 'something's missing' variety that gave away an ambush, so he was glad that Kalinka didn't talk to him again until they arrived at the house.

X offered her something to drink after she hung up her helmet and coat and got the snow off her boots. "Roll said that you wanted to talk to me?" she asked him.

"Is there anything you can tell me about Duo?" he asked, showing her a seat and then sitting down himself. Without armor, he looked younger than she did, although there was something similar about their eyes.

"My father is the one that worked on him… but that's why you're asking me." Kalinka took a breath. "I shouldn't have installed the crystals into the others. It seemed mad, but so mad that I assumed he wouldn't have suggested something like that without a good reason. I recognized them from images of the one the team brought back before Wily stole it – my father built those robots, the ones that explored the asteroid. He does, we do, quite a lot of humanoid support unit-level robots for various applications, like Ring Man's Robot Police units."

X nodded. "Not fully sapient, but capable of some initiative. More initiative than one would assume, when they found themselves dealing with alien defense units and had to prioritize what to bring back."

She gave him a thin smile. "The Mother Computer project… Dr. Light isn't the only one who hasn't been able to retain ownership of his work, after refusing to license to the wrong people." The military-industrial complex had _wanted _robot masters, up until Dr. Wily made it very clear that trying to use robot masters or any kind of drone would be handing him a free army. The industrial side of it still wanted them, could still get away with making use of them up until it was bad enough to cross the line, and they still hoped that they could cross that line without Dr. Wily's robot masters finding out about it.

Zero wondered what she would think of X putting his original plans and the rest of his technology that they could figure out in the public domain, but it did set the precedent that the parts of a reploid's body weren't anyone's intellectual property, and so the reploid was no one's property but their own. Imagine if people were able to twist copyright law into some ownership of reploids containing parts they designed…

"I'd really like to talk to you and your father about the Robot Rights Movement from your perspective," When Dr. Cossack wrote a book that was still a major historical text when X woke up, "But if Dr. Cossack built the team that first encountered this kind of technology, then I understand why you didn't see the need to ask for details in the middle of an emergency."

"The crystals shouldn't have shorted them out like that. I barely had time to build a token interface, so I decided to build one that would break down if the crystal tried to shunt too much power into their bodies, and where the damage was located… They _weren't _interfacing with their power systems," she told X. "My brothers have surge protectors. There should _not _have been power surges in their processors."

"I believe you," X said. "In my era, there was practically an epidemic of things ending up in people's processors that really shouldn't have been able to get in there."

No, there was a literal epidemic of it, but Zero wasn't going to derail the conversation just because X had made a kind of a joke, trying to reassure Kalinka that he believed her.

"I believe it's the same principle," X told her. "And since my power generation is derived from those crystals, I'm a little concerned."

Meaning he wanted to know what she knew about Duo. "The crystals came from the White Giant's arm. I think it made my father lie so people wouldn't know that the crystals that made my brothers crazy came from it. It crashed into our transport, and my father had the body of one of the robots we sell teleported in. He attached the White Giant's arm to it, and set my voice as an authorized user."

"Authorized user?"

"That kind of robot usually goes to construction sites that don't need a robot master, just a unit to do the heavy lifting," she told him. "They're speech capable, but only a few phrases, like warning someone to get out of the way. The unit obeyed me, but… Its priorities were wrong. We set our robots to protect people, even other low-level robots, not just humans, and it wouldn't have protected Mega Man and the others if I hadn't ordered it to stop attacking and block that stardroid's attack instead. That was when I was certain, but…"

"You know enough about how these units act that you already knew something changed its personality."

The engineer nodded. "A completely different fundamental decision-making architecture. My father's greatest fear is robots being used for war. People using them as instruments of murder so they can pretend their own hands are clean, so they can do horrible things and quiet their consciences. Pretend that it's the robots that are evil, use that as an excuse to force children to murder children. A robot that prioritized destruction over saving people's lives… He could not have programmed such a thing. Not after what happened to Skull Man."

X hesitated, but since it was upsetting her, "May I…?"

"Ask?" She looked down at the coffee table, at her still-gloved hands. There was no bare skin except her face: a good habit, for someone that worked with robotics. Zero remembered when it was safe for there to be human doctors, or robotics engineers, in Hunter medical, even though X and Dr. Cain made an effort to have the reploid trainees get as much practice as possible.

Especially in a cold climate like this: bare human skin could stick to metal, couldn't it?

"He was completed after I was kidnapped. Dr. Wily ordered my father to build him like that, a robot child forced to fight for a _human _child. Fight another child robot, at that. After the war, Skull Man didn't have the Three Laws, my father didn't want to install them and rebuild his body as well. He didn't know what to do, and Skull Man looked like a Wilybot, and I… He… We failed him, as a family. Then we couldn't save Copy-Rock, either. The crystals drove my brothers berserk, they turned their weapons on…" The angry shake of her head moved her hair as well, reminded Zero of his own. "None of this, none of it, is anything my father would have done. Not to my brothers, especially not to a unit he'd just turned on." She scowled. "But I'm certain that Duo wasn't a new unit. That was the White Giant, just pretending to obey my orders."

"Why?" Zero asked her.

"I don't know, any more than I know why it made my father tell that lie, claim that he kept Dr. Wily's data. As though we want anything to do with Wily's programming, after what he did to turn my brothers into combat units." A moment of hesitation. "I think it wanted to see what I would do with that power." That just made her even angrier. As though she would let people be killed right in front of her! "But I'm not certain of it, not the way I'm certain that Duo wasn't our work." Not a Cossackbot. "I don't know what he is, I don't know how they think. Just like a robot master might not do something for the same reason a human would, even though in some things we're very alike."

"_I'm beginning to think I did something very stupid," _Zero sent to X. At this short range, it wouldn't be intercepted.

A simple "_?" _was the reply, while X said to Kalinka, "I'm still discovering the differences between robot masters and androids myself. I think a lot of it is that they network so easily, that they're rarely alone but can always reach out to the people around them to help and be helped. It's not that they're different just because they're different, but how they interact with the world and each other is different. People are shaped by their experiences, change how they approach the world based on what works and what doesn't, so two people who experience very different things are doing to develop in different ways."

"_I'd assumed that I was responsible for the Cataclysm because I'm a force of destruction, and what else was there that would possibly destroy your family and mine?" _Another Wilybot? Why would a Wilybot kill their own family? Zero wasn't a proper Wilybot: when he woke up, he was a rabid beast. "_I know more about finding out who's responsible for a maverick attack than _that_. Ignorance of the situation is not evidence." _Not knowing of anything else that could do it didn't mean the one thing he did know of was the answer, it didn't prove a damn thing.

"_Rubble_," X sent. "_Rubble, a second asteroid belt, in every timeline except the one where you were completed with your current design. It makes you wonder, doesn't it?" _

Since that was a rhetorical question, Zero saw no reason to tell X he agreed, not when the idea of him being any kind of savior was just wrong. Recognizing his silence as grudging agreement, or at least the temporary inability to make a good argument that X was wrong, X continued, "_There's the time machine. We could move forward to do recon, but there's still a lot of information out there that we can gather without the risk of bringing something back with us." _

That, Zero definitely agreed with. Especially since X was immune and Zero wasn't. He was _not _letting X go and face who-knew-what without him, but he'd been flooded with the virus before. He was _not _going to kill X and then come back and kill X's family.

Kalinka coughed politely. Zero was a little surprised she spotted it: the two of them had a lot of practice keeping private conversations private. Perhaps there was some tell that the reploids and humans of 21XX didn't recognize that someone who grew up with seven robot masters, who networked constantly instead of using coms occasionally, would recognize. He made a note of that, although he'd already noted not to even try to have a private com conversation around Roll.

"We were reviewing what the people of 21XX think about certain aspects of this era," X said. "It's looking like the general assumptions are wrong."

"The 'general assumptions' about robot masters always are," in her experience. "What you said about networking: it's very true. A robot master should not be alone, any more than a human should be. That's why my father wrote his book, about treating robot masters as family. At the time, I was a little, well, seven younger siblings?" If they were valued the same as her even though they weren't human, did that mean she was less than human to him, that she wasn't special to her only parent? "Robot masters… they look after their robots. Helping others is an 'Of _course_' to them, even if those others are objectively inferior. _More _so if they're weaker and less intelligent, since it means they need the help more. So… if humans don't see the robot masters they own as worth helping, worth caring about, that means that something must be very wrong with the robot master… or with that human. And if all the humans they know see them as things, then that's their sample of what humanity is like."

So a robot master in a bad situation? Of course they would start to think that all humans were like that, if every single solitary human they encountered was. That was what the evidence would show them. "Dr. Wily is a very cruel man," she continued, "but the position of robot masters would be much worse if it weren't for his pettiness. The abusive can't keep their robot masters, and the laws governing the treatment of robot masters we _do _have are almost all because of him or Mega Man." And Mega Man wouldn't be a hero if he didn't need to stop .

"I read your father's book years ago," soon after he was released from the capsule, "but…"

"Are you done yet?" Axl yelled from upstairs.

"Should I get him outside again?" Zero asked X.

"It's up to you," X told him.

Zero shrugged: X would tell him any important information he missed later, and Kalinka might speak more freely without a Wilybot standing right there. She probably thought he cared about his family, and wouldn't want to say anything too bad about them in front of him, even if it was true.

They _needed _to know the bad things she had to say about Zero's creator. Both Rock and Dr. Light considered Dr. Wily a very dangerous person, but Rock was like X, and Dr. Light was an old friend of his. They were both the kind of people who gave the benefit of the doubt, even though they'd acknowledged long ago that Dr. Wily wasn't going to reform and they needed to treat him as a clear and present danger. His children, though, weren't necessarily enemies, no matter who built them.

Then there was the fact that Zero was X's friend, and that meant Rock and Dr. Light didn't want Zero to kill himself. Of _course _they were going to slant what they said with that in mind: Zero knew how X was about people dying, and they were where he'd gotten it from, apparently. So, anything about Dr. Wily's possible intentions for Zero, the implications of Zero's abilities that might leap out at 20XX's AI specialists, unlike X who had spent his entire life working with reploid-based technology? They _needed _a scientist who hated Dr. Wily like a normal person on the one hand, but could be trusted not to reveal X's existence and get Dr. Light's family in trouble on the other. Sure, that was also a bias, but two biased for and one against was better than only having the two biased for.

Kalinka might not have made it into the history books other than as Dr. Cossack's daughter, but given her age, she might just have died before she got a chance to stand out. Trying to compete with Drs. Light and Wily? Dr. Cossack was only remembered because of the Fourth War and his book. Even if she wasn't a genius, they still needed her. They needed someone with the familiarity with 20XX technology and concepts that X lacked.

Roll would have been ideal, since her opinion of Dr. Wily was that everyone would be saved a lot of trouble if someone hit him over the head and repeated as necessary to keep him unconscious, but Roll wasn't immune.

"Dr. Light and Rock are studying Zero," X said once Zero had gone upstairs. He wouldn't be coming down this way: there was another staircase in what probably used to be servants' quarters.

She nodded. "Roll is keeping me informed."

"Ah, you said that you and Roll were friends?"

"We competed in the-Well, she competed in Battle and Chase, we built the car she drove together. Bright Man and I were going to be her pit crew, but then Dr. Wily attacked the race, and the two of us had allowed my father to get the impression that Dr. Light gave Roll permission to complete," Kalinka said, not even bothering to pretend that was in any way accidental. "Ring Man found out and locked down our transport before we reached Hawaii, and Bright Man wouldn't help me get control back." And a human, even a roboticist, trying to regain control over a computer-controlled vehicle after it was taken by a robot master?

"Well, once the race turned into a battle…"

"It was always going to turn into a battle, that was why Roll wanted to compete, and _she didn't have armor_. If Dr. Light upgraded her into a warbot, then…" Long story and nasty legal situation, that was X's guess when Kalinka shook her head, lips tight and eyes dark. He could see that Kalinka hadn't appreciated Ring Man keeping her away when Roll might end up needing urgent medical attention. "That fake Mega Man shot her and nearly killed her in the last war before the race. Battle and Chase was only a few months after the tournament, just in time for Dr. Wily to be ready for another war: the WRO is tasteless like that. We couldn't just build Roll external armor, she would have to be completely rebuilt to be a warbot. Rock was built to be able to survive lab explosions: they've had to redesign a few things and put in replacements more frequently than expected because of the wear, but his body can handle the weight of the armor provided he doesn't overstress anything. Roll has much better articulation and dexterity than he does, that's why she can do labwork just as well as Rock without the Variable Tool System."

X was nodding. "Too many potential failure points, if she's suddenly carrying a hundred additional kilograms. They'd have to rip out and redo her entire endoskeletal structure, and she'd lose so much performance it wouldn't be worth it." Waving at himself, he said, "I can have this kind of articulation and carry armor because the nanites compensate for wear, but it sounds like she's built like Zero, without the nanites. This was a problem for reploids, too: that's why so many of the members of the Shinobi unit were custom units, different engineers trying to figure out how to min-max the problem of close-range specialists."

Her eyes lit up. "Because nanites require a pseudo-circulatory system, and that adds another set of design constraints."

Oh, of course she and Roll had already discussed this as an option, X realized. Roll wouldn't even have needed to tell Kalinka about him. "She already has a lot of functions and subsystems: without building her into a larger frame," X didn't have any ideas. "Alia made a lot of advances, but I'm not sure how many of them are applicable to robot masters."

Oh? She motioned for him to go on.

"Over time, a lot of people have experimented a lot with reploid design. Signas, the son of a friend of mine, is structurally closest to a robot master, although of course he has nanites. His articulation is, well, I wouldn't recommend borrowing any of that design for Roll. He wouldn't have put up with those limitations if we didn't need him. Alia was taller than Roll: she started out with a non-combat structure but with the circulatory system in place of Roll's master system. In our time, networking was limited since we were trying to stop the spread of the virus." Just because it didn't _need _to spread that way didn't mean it _couldn't_. "I don't have plans for robot masters in my databanks, so I don't really know much yet about how they're put together, but is a taller body an option?" Since that would alleviate the space constraints.

Kalinka shook her head. "How aware are you of the Light family's position?"

"Not as aware as I'd like to be."

"Mega Man was not even offered the position of head of the robot police. Not that Ring Man was asked: he was transferred by the municipal police force my father wanted him to join to the WRO's new, international organization. The official reason is that Ring Man is not a warbot: he was built to capture, not injure. The unofficial reason is that no one is very happy with the fact that conventional forces are at a massive disadvantage against robot masters: the more technology they use, the more helpless they are, meaning that militaries that didn't have the money to modernize potentially have a massive advantage against the forces of the developed world, if they could force robot masters without the first law to work for them.

"They ordered Dr. Light to build Gamma, a robot able to fight robots, and even let Dr. Wily out for that purpose, because they wanted such a thing. They wanted it very, very much, to the point the power crystals were secondary. Otherwise, they would have launched another mission to retrieve them. The WRO sponsored that gladiatorial game because they want more warbots: Dr. Wily made it very clear that he will tolerate no warbots other than his own and Mega Man. The creation of his friend from his university days. Dr. Light has been imprisoned by the government three times now, because they suspected him of things that were Dr. Wily's doing. In the eyes of some, the fact they were Dr. Wily's doing doesn't necessarily mean that Dr. Light is innocent, either. If Roll became a warbot? Even the ability to defend herself: many will look at that and assume she, that Dr. Light, wants those capabilities for the sake of offense. Rebuilding her, making her look obviously different for the sake of being combat-capable?"

"Would put her family in danger." The same way X's very existence did, in a world where they tried to kill robots because it might be possible for them to say no. "What about yours?"

"We have some more trust because we've suffered at the hands of Dr. Wily. None of Dr. Light's creations are dead." Not like her brother, and wasn't that suspicious? "They would rather a unit like Ring Man was under the control of someone who wasn't a robot rights activist, but at the moment, they have no alternatives. Dr. Wily's arrogance sees to that: he hates competition, people seeing someone else as a genius and ignoring him."

"If Dr. Light owns the only unit that can protect them from Dr. Wily, some would see that as a source of power. So they want an alternative, like Repliforce." At least no one could claim that the Mavericks were leaving the Maverick Hunters alone, that they had some secret treaty or were even working together. "In my time, there were mercenary units that people could hire if they were afraid that the Hunters might not be able to assist them." Might not have the resources in the face of widespread attacks, might not get there in time. "They tended not to survive very long, with a handful of exceptions." Axl's stepfather was _very_ old for a reploid when the virus finally got him. "No one except your father has managed to build a," no, not a warbot, that was important to the Cossacks, "robot capable of subduing other robots that is personally loyal to him and refuses to join Dr. Wily?" Or at least Ring Man had rejoined Dr. Cossack once freed by Mega Man?

"The eight finalists from the tournament were traumatized by Copy Mega Man. They might not want to join Dr. Wily, but they don't want to fight, either. Even the ones that were obviously purpose-built warbots were covered as civilian units, because warbots are illegal. They were returned to their supposedly-civilian work in order to keep the cover of those projects intact. Since they know their builders put them in that danger, and now see them as failures, why should they fight for them? They did fight during the stardroid incident, but that was to protect co-workers, friends they had made, and the kind of people who want warbots see that as merely the First Law in action, and thus useless for their purposes. Forte… the implications of Forte worry them. How do they get a warbot without the First Law to kill only enemy humans? Forte ruins Dr. Wily's plans far more often than he does anything helpful."

Convincing people that building robot masters to try to force them to kill was a bad idea sounded very helpful to X. His goals weren't Dr. Wily's, but if Dr. Wily was trying to discourage others from building warbots to compete with his own designs… "How do you get anyone with free will to want to help you?" X asked, and for him it was an entirely rhetorical question. Help them. Be worth helping.

"Speaking of uncontrollable people…" She looked around.

Who was she looking for? She knew that Zero and Axl had gone back outside: Ah, they had another houseguest. "Lumine has a Wilybot e-mail account, and Shade Man sent him a link to a video game called Minecraft. He wants Lumine to build him a space elevator, since he heard on the grapevine that the Lumine of our time built one." Lumine had taken that as a personal challenge, not wanting to be outdone by another of himself, and was up in his room taking online crash courses in engineering, materials science and something called the Kerbal Space Program.

X wasn't going to complain: this was a much better hobby than world domination.

"Shade Man is the one who figured out how to get Ring Man and the others into orbit to fight the stardroids and Ra Moon," Kalinka said. "Star Man still manages their satellites, but since Shade Man took over their aerospace program, I'm sure they're doing more spying with them."

"Zero met him: he got the impression that Shade Man was more concerned about the stardroids than anything else, and wasn't likely to… No?" X asked when Kalinka started shaking her head.

"No," she said bluntly. "He and Shadow are Dr. Wily's enforcers. Oh, most people believe that the Second Numbers are his enforcers, but they only rescue robot masters, they have nothing to do with the wars. They helped when Wily Island was attacked by the White Giant, but they have their own bases, somewhere, and build their own robots. They have organized themselves, they're not under Wily's command. Most of the Third Numbers went to live on their own for awhile after I was kidnapped and my family was forced to fight, although that wasn't because they objected to my kidnapping but because Dr. Wily wasn't providing them with upkeep and wanted them to support themselves. They moved back to Wily Island once it was built. Shadow remained with Dr. Wily the entire time: he kidnapped me and supervised Copy-Rock. The Fifth Numbers were built to be self-sufficient from the beginning: they too will not be overly inconvenienced by his death. Except for the fact that I'm sure people will want them brought under control once they no longer have Dr. Wily's protection. The Seventh Numbers, of which Shade Man is one, are some of the rescued robot masters: they volunteered to help Dr. Wily during his plans for Battle and Chase. One of them hated Mega Man so much, because he fought for the humans, that when he thought he was about to die he tried to kill Roll and Ice Man."

X's eyebrows rose at that: that was _very _different from what he was learning about 20XX's normal. It was more like what he was used to, sadly.

"Shade Man told Rock that there was a bomb under Roll's car, and that if he didn't win Battle and Chase it would be set off. It's a rare robot master that doesn't mind having innocents in danger: even Shadow Man helped Roll, when she and Ice Man were attacked by the Gilliam Knights – attack non-sentient robots that Wily deployed in a populated area, not under a robot master's control," she explained. "The Third Numbers kept me prisoner, but I think that when they scared me, they thought it was funny because it was ridiculous of me to be scared, and if I thought so poorly of robot masters then I deserved to suffer a little for it." Since she was the daughter of a roboticist, and they thought Dr. Wily's understanding of robots was normal, or how humans should be at any rate. So she should have known better. "I was in danger because of , not because of what they might have done to me on their own initiative. Shade Man hasn't been involved in any violence since then, but a lot of politicians have been having their files leak and other such things. They're claiming that Dr. Wily fabricated them, of course, even though he says he doesn't know or care what they're talking about, but Ring Man is certain that Shade Man is behind it, and Shadow is helping him infiltrate and get the physical files."

X tried not to look too visibly happy or intrigued. Yes, theft and kidnapping were wrong, but murder was worse, he could really use a cut of the intel they were getting and he'd worked with Wilybots almost his entire life. He'd have to ask Lumine for Shade Man's e-mail.

* * *

_I will eternally be amused that X ends up ruling the world, probably due to a combination of popular demand and 'if you want something done right…' And then of course the only way to resign was to go AWOL, because apparently, as someone with more than 150 years of leadership experience by the time he left, he was too good at it for his own good and no one would let him retire._

_His feelings about politics are rather like his feelings about combat: he hates both of them, but he hates the idea of standing by and letting people be murdered even more. _

_What's interesting is that everyone here from the Classic timeline (except Kalinka, whose personal experience is that things have _always _been dark) is thinking that things are getting darker and darker, but from X's perspective, everything is so nice and sunny and genocide is a possibility instead of an ongoing reality! _

_Also, there are forests with trees that don't have mechanical life support built into them, and his family's alive…_

_I'd make a joke about 'this is so much Lighter and Softer he needs sunglasses' but then everyone would want him to take them off, he looks like Blues and it is scaring them._


End file.
